Radical Pragmatism

An Alternative

Robert J. Roth

Pages: 396

Fordham University Press

This book can be opened with

Paperback / softback

ISBN: 9780823218523

Published: 01 January 1999

$35.00

Hardback

ISBN: 9780823218516

Published: 01 January 1999

$95.00

Description

Robert Roth, among the first few Catholics to write favorably, even if critically, about American pragmatism, presents here a creative piece of comparative philosophy in which he achieves a long-term goal of attempting a reconciliation between pragmatism and a classical spiritual and religious perspective. The title, Radical Pragmatism, is an adaptation of William James’s "radical empiricism." James had argues that the classical empiricists, Locke and Hume, did not go far enough in their account of experience. They missed some of its most important aspects, namely connections and relations, and as a result they were left with discrete sense data and sense objects.

Praise

Roth (emeritus, Fordham Univ.) examines the work of the classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, and Dewey), and of the biologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, on evolution and the relation between science and religion. Roth maintains that there are gaps in classical pragmatism that are best filled with a spiritual explanation. For example, Peirce, James, and Dewey stressed that useful scientific hypotheses are much more than generalizations from the facts, yet they had little to say about how hypotheses are generated. Roth focuses on recent interpretations of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man (1955). Unsatisfied with vague appeals to "flashes of insight" or creative genius, Roth (following Teilhard de Chardin) sees the work of a transcendent being: "The soul, though radically discontinuous with biological evolution, is involved in its continuous process, in the whole phenomenon." The view is a contemporary version of ancient appeals to divine inspiration (e.g., Plato's Iona). Skeptics will respond that nothing is gained by explaining one mystery by another. However, even skeptics will find it illuminating to review central passages in Peirce, James, and Dewey from an explicitly religious perspective. General readers; undergraduate and graduate students.——Choice

Author(s)

Robert J. Roth is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Fordham University. His publications include John Dewey and Self-Realization, American Religious Philosophy, and British Empiricism and American Pragmaticism.