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Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing "Democracy and Social Ethics"

Marilyn Fischer

This book makes the case that the key to reconstructing Addams’s arguments in Democracy and Social Ethics is to approach them through the lens of late nineteenth century social evolutionary ... More

This book makes the case that the key to reconstructing Addams’s arguments in Democracy and Social Ethics is to approach them through the lens of late nineteenth century social evolutionary theorizing. Although Democracy and Social Ethics is now regarded as a founding text of classical American pragmatism, its evolutionary content has not been explored. This book demonstrates that in essays written during the 1890s and lightly revised for Democracy and Social Ethics Addams relies on evolutionary concepts and patterns of reasoning to develop a method of ethical deliberation with which to address her era’s social problems. Chapters 1-6 examine how Addams in the original essays employs two distinct social evolutionary frameworks, one from British Fabian socialism and the other from German anthropology. Chapter 7 examines how Addams masks these frames in Democracy and Social Ethics by substituting the conceptual categories of individual ethics and social ethics. This substitution has the effect of diminishing the intellectual power and coherence of Addams’s theorizing. The book concludes that in leaving Democracy and Social Ethics conceptually untidy, Addams produced a richer and more enduring text, one that invites her readers to participate more deeply in ethical reflection.Less

On Knowing--The Social Sciences

Richard P. McKeon

David B. Owen and Joanne K. Olson (eds)

As a philosopher, the author spent his career developing Pragmatism in a new key, specifically by tracing the ways in which philosophic problems arise in fields other than philosophy—across the ... More

As a philosopher, the author spent his career developing Pragmatism in a new key, specifically by tracing the ways in which philosophic problems arise in fields other than philosophy—across the natural and social sciences and aesthetics—and showed the ways in which any problem, pushed back to its beginning or taken to its end, is a philosophic problem. The roots of this book are traced to the author's classes where he blended philosophy with physics, ethics, politics, history, and aesthetics. This volume leaves behind natural science themes to embrace freedom, power, and history, which, it argues, lay out the whole field of human action. The authors considered—Hobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, and J. S. Mill—show brilliantly how philosophic methods work in action, via analyses that do not merely reduce or deconstruct meaning, but enhance those texts by reconnecting them to the active history of philosophy and to problems of ethics, politics, and history. The waves of modernism and post-modernism are receding. Philosophic pluralism is now available, fully formulated, in this book, spreading from the humanities to the social sciences.Less

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism

Steven B. Smith

Interest in Leo Strauss is greater now than at any time since his death, because of the link between his thought and the political movement called “neoconservatism.” This book depicts Strauss not as ... More

Interest in Leo Strauss is greater now than at any time since his death, because of the link between his thought and the political movement called “neoconservatism.” This book depicts Strauss not as a high priest of neoconservatism but as a friend of liberal democracy, showing that his defense of liberal democracy was closely connected with his skepticism of both the extreme Left and the extreme Right. The author asserts that philosophical skepticism defined Strauss's thought. It was as a skeptic that Strauss considered the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and revelation—a conflict he dubbed the “theologico-political problem.” Throughout his life, Strauss pondered over the relation of the political order to revelation in general and Judaism in particular. The author addresses Strauss's views on religion and examines his thought on philosophical and political issues. The author assesses Strauss's attempt to direct the teaching of political science away from the examination of mass behavior and interest-group politics toward the study of the philosophical principles on which politics is based.Less

Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country

Albert Borgmann

America is a country that affords its citizens the broadest freedoms and the greatest prosperity in the world. But it is also embroiled in a war that many of its citizens consider unjust and even ... More

America is a country that affords its citizens the broadest freedoms and the greatest prosperity in the world. But it is also embroiled in a war that many of its citizens consider unjust and even illegal. It continues to ravage the natural environment and ignore poverty both at home and abroad, and its culture is increasingly driven by materialism and consumerism. But America, for better or for worse, is still a nation that we have built. So why then, asks this work, are we failing to take responsibility for it? The author asks us to reevaluate our role in the making of American values. Taking his cue from Winston Churchill—who once observed that we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us—the author considers the power of our most enduring institutions and the condition of our present moral makeup to propose new ways in which we, as ordinary citizens, can act to improve our country. This, he shows, includes everything from where we choose to live and what we spend our money on to daunting tasks like the reshaping of our cities—habits and actions that can guide us to more accomplished and virtuous lives. Using prose that is direct throughout, the author's position is grounded neither by conservative nor liberal ideology, but in his understanding that he is a devoted citizen among many.Less

Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher

Neil Gross

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as “one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.” Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of ... More

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as “one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.” Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. This biography explores the path of his thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that prominence. The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son “wasn't rebellious enough,” Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty's own thought. Doctoral work at Yale University led to Rorty's landing a job at Princeton University, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, he quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition—but, by the late 1970s, had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a “relaxed attitude” toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, Rorty argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge—an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time.Less

The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner (eds)

The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead brings together a range of scholars who provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, ... More

The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead brings together a range of scholars who provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, environmental studies, democratic epistemology, social ethics, non-teleological historiography, and the history of the natural and social sciences. The volume is divided into three main areas in which Mead’s thinking has inspired contemporary work. The first is the area of history, historiography, and historical sociology. The second follows from one of the fundamental reorientations of intellectual and political life in recent decades: the turn to a greater awareness of environmental problems, both in an empirical and in a normative sense, and the rethinking of earlier assumptions about “man and nature” in light of this turn. And the third has to do with the outburst of new research in neurobiology, brain studies, and evolutionary psychology. Edited and introduced by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner, the volume as a whole makes a coherent statement that places Mead in dialogue with current research, pushing these domains of scholarship forward while also revitalizing the growing literature on an author who has an ongoing and major influence on sociology, psychology, and philosophy.Less