Quotes from Richard J. Bernstein

Much later, I discovered Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's wonderful remark about Experience and Nature: "Although Dewey's book is incredibly ill-written, it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.

Brandom's critics, and more generally those critics of pragmatism who hold fast to their strong "realistic intuitions," want something much more substantial and nonperspectival. They want acknowledgment of a hard-core reality that is not "contaminated" by human subjectivity or perspective.

Sorting out which prejudices are to be criticized or rejected is not the beginning point of inquiry, but an end product, an achievement of inquiry.

All these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair – or his – out of desperation" (James 1977, p. 44). "The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of [Hegel's] procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.

Peirce shifts our attention from the origins of ideas and hypotheses to their consequences for our conduct.

A unifying theme in all the classical pragmatists as well as their successors is the development of a philosophical orientation that replaces Cartesianism (in all its varieties).

Although "being-in-the-world" is not an expression that any of the classical American pragmatists ever used, it beautifully articulates the pragmatic understanding of the transaction that takes place between human organisms and their environment – a transaction that involves know-how and is the basis for knowing-that.

Peirce relentlessly criticizes the subjectivism that lies at the heart of so much modern epistemology, and he develops an intersubjective (social) understanding of inquiry, knowing, communication, and logic.

The capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash" (Peirce 1992, p. 223).

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness to any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Peirce 1992, p. 29)

It is agreeable to imagine a future in which the tiresome 'analytic–Continental split' is looked back upon as an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication – a future in which Sellars and Habermas, Davidson and Gadamer, Putnam and Derrida, Rawls and Foucault, are seen as fellow-travelers on the same journey, fellow-citizens of what Michael Oakeshott called a civitas pelegrina. (Rorty 1997a, pp. 11–12)

Dewey consistently argues that any theory of human beings that fails to acknowledge that human beings "are not isolated non-social atoms" is defective, a misleading abstraction of philosophers.

When we engage in a philosophical argument with an opponent, the primary issue is frequently about who has offered the best reasons to support her thesis. It is an illusion to think that there are ahistorical determinate standards to which we can appeal that will sharply distinguish once and for all what "really" are good or better reasons. What counts as "good reasons" is essentially contested.

Jerry Fodor, a fierce critic of pragmatist approaches to mind and language, puts this sort of criticism in a nutshell when he says: "First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes" (Fodor 1994, p. 111).

Putnam rejects the idea that there is a single "scientific method." But he also thinks that this is not what Dewey meant when he appeals to scientific method in solving ethical problems. Rather, Dewey is appealing to experimentation, imaginative construction of alternative hypotheses, open discussion, debate, and ongoing self-corrective communal criticism.

His primary aim is to criticize Cartesianism and the thesis that we have direct intuitive knowledge – the type of intuition not determined by prior cognitions and one that can serve as an epistemological foundation.

In 1910, John Dewey published an important essay entitled "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (Dewey 1981, pp. 31–41). In a recent unpublished lecture, "The Importance of Darwin for Philosophy," Philip Kitcher describes Dewey's essay as "the single best philosophical response to Darwin published in the first century after the appearance of the Origin.

Dreyfus (1991) claims that Heidegger radicalized "the insights already contained in the writings of such pragmatists as Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey" (p. 6). See also Haugeland 1982, where he writes: "I make Heidegger out to be less like Husserl and/or Sartre than is usual, and more like Dewey (and to a lesser extent) Sellars and the later Wittgenstein" (p. 15).

Rorty is just as dismissive of James's many references to 'experience' – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty's pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.

I]f we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole preferred – there is no other truthful word – as one's best working attitude. (James 1977, pp. 14–15)

The expression "pragmatism" is like an accordion; it is sometimes stretched to include a wide diversity of positions and thinkers (not just philosophers) and sometimes restricted to specific doctrines of the original American pragmatists.

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. (Peirce 1992, pp. 28–9)

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist's verifiability criterion of meaning.