Rydenfelt begins by considering how some classical pragmatists approached the question of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. With that background in place, Rydenfelt proceeds to argue that pragmatism provides a unique perspective on questions within contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. Influenced by idealism but rejecting its invidious distinction between humans and nonhumans, appropriating the worldview of post-Darwinian science but refusing to see philosophy as just another one of the special sciences, pragmatism makes room for a distinct approach to philosophical questions about the environment. One of the most important of those questions is that of the value of nature, and environmental pragmatism understands the pursuit of such normative questions as empirical and experimental, thus attempting to connect normative theory with social practice. Still, it offers no quick and easy solutions but instead recognizes that the pursuit of philosophical questions about nature, like philosophical inquiry generally, and like scientific inquiry even more generally, is a long-term endeavor.

Festenstein begins by considering Richard Rorty’s response to authoritarian populism, a response that some critics have found to be insufficient. For example, Cheryl Misak argues that the concept of inquiry implies a commitment to an inclusive form of liberal democracy and thus a rejection of authoritarianism. But according to Festenstein, that epistemic defense of democracy is insufficient to guarantee the sort of inclusiveness required by a genuinely democratic society. He argues that pragmatist epistemic defenses of democracy should be augmented by John Dewey’s political philosophy, e.g., his diagnosis of the pathologies of democracy an analysis of authoritarian populism as a distorted form of what Dewey described as the “search for the public.” That diagnosis also affords us an understanding of the social causes and effects of anti-democratic epistemic exclusion, and according to Festenstein, Dewey’s ideas enable a better understanding of and response to authoritarian populism than those made possible by narrowly epistemic arguments alone.

Dea’s account of the development of the idea of academic freedom begins with Wilhelm von Humboldt, who envisioned the university as an institution committed to research, to the intertwining of research and teaching, and to academic freedom. Humboldt influenced both Charles Peirce and John Dewey. Peirce held that the purpose of a university is “the production of knowledge” and that university students should learn not by listening to lectures but by participating in research. For Dewey, the function of a university is to seek the truth, and any restriction on academic freedom is an attack on the university itself. He held that the primary threat to academic freedom is the tendency of universities to expand and the consequences of that expansion. Dea concludes by considering the threat that authoritarianism continues to pose to academic freedom and the resources that Peirce and Dewey provide to help us respond to that threat.

Miras Boronat addresses the work of progressive-era feminists who have been incorporated into the history of pragmatism and are now regarded as feminist pragmatists. She argues that some of those figures already had the resources to deal in important ways with two issues still relevant today: the distinction between sex and gender, and intersectionality. Decades before de Beauvoir or Stoller addressed the sex/gender distinction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jessie Taftwas were applying it to the so-called woman question. Gilman’s critique of androcentrism relied on a distinction between the biological and the cultural, while Taft approached the matter from the point of view of social behaviorism and understood gender in terms of social roles and expectations. On the subject of intersectionality, Miras Boronat describes the work of Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about the “double invisibility” of Black women at the beginning of the progressive era, and she adresses recent work inspired by Cooper that is aimed at developing an analytical approach to intersectionality.

Ambrosio reads Charles Peirce’s pragmatic maxim as inviting us to conduct experiments with our imaginations. On her account, the images that Peirce used to prompt his audience into such imaginative inquiry are tools that elicit imaginative activity. But since they are external and public, they also constrain that activity, resulting in shared habits that are subject to social criticism and thus to change. Ambrosio also considers John Dewey’s characterization of deliberation as “dramatic rehearsal” in the imagination of different possible courses of action. While she notes that Dewey’s approach to the imagination adds a moral dimension missing from Peirce’s, she sees the two pragmatists as united in the view that experimental imaginative activities are empirical and social with important material components. She also engages with contemporary work on the imagination, suggesting that contributors to recent debates on that topic would benefit from studying Peirce and Dewey.

Carter examines the use that some pragmatists have made of the black intellectual tradition (BIT), “the body of belles-lettres, polemical essays, pamphlets, speeches, books, slave narratives, poetry, articles, fiction, and sermons that articulate the experiences in the Americas of African-descendant peoples.” He describes assumptions underlying attempts to connect the BIT to classical pragmatism, e.g., that elements of the BIT illuminate works of pragmatists, that the BIT complements pragmatism, and that pragmatist ideas can be used to correct aspects of the BIT. He examines strategies pragmatists have used to make that connection, from simply assuming that there is such a connection, to arguing from the fact that a black philosopher was taught by a pragmatist to the conclusion that the philosopher’s work is pragmatist in nature, to showing that the ideas of a black philosopher are similar to or compatible with those of a classical pragmatist. Criticizing the tendency to appropriate the BIT in an effort to improve pragmatism without acknowledging that the BIT is itself philiosophical, Carter argues for a more intentional examination of these integrative efforts.

Lane argues that Charles Peirce’s philosophy can contribute to contemporary debates about the metaphysical and moral status of prenatal humans. Some participants in those debates view an early embryo as numerically identical to, and as having the same moral status as, the adult to which it gives rise; bioethicists in this camp tend to maintain that our metaphysical and moral judgments about prenatal humans are capable of objective truth. Others argue from the continuity of prenatal development to the view that metaphysical judgments about when beings like us begin to exist and moral judgments about when beings like us attain moral status cannot be objective. Lane argues that Peirce provides the resources for developing alternative positions. Those resources are Peirce’s synechism, according to which continuity is of central importance in philosophy, his scholastic realism, according to which there are real kinds, his basic realism, according to which there is a world that is the way it is apart from how anyone represents it to be, and his pragmatic clarifications of the concepts of reality and truth.

Donelson argues that pragmatism is a valuable tool in our thinking about three issues surrounding punishment. The first is how punishment should be defined; he argues in favor of understanding punishment in terms of practical criteria, e.g., ensuring that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is interpreted in a just fashion. The second issue concerns debates about policing and prisons; Donelson argues that pragmatism, and in particular James’s pragmatic method, can help reframe those debates. He describes the respective positions of reformers and abolitionists and suggests, from a Jamesian deflationary perspective, that the reform-versus-abolitionist debate should be approached as a debate over how we should think and speak about policing and imprisonment. The third issue is how best to understand “mass” incarceration. Donelson’s view is that the concept of mass incarceration is normative and that natural facts alone cannot settle the question of what levels of incarceration count as mass and what levels count as unproblematic; on his view, we cannot understand whether a given level counts as mass incarceration without assuming some normative criterion.

In this introduction to Pragmatism Revisited, Robert Lane summarizes the book’s fifteen chapters. Those chapters apply classical and newer pragmatist ideas to a wide range of issues, including the imagination, conceptual change, ignorance, religious fundamentalism, truth in political discourse, authoritarian populism, academic freedom, criminal punishment and mass incarceration, environmental philosophy, bioethics, artificial intelligence, the Black intellectual tradition, feminism, gender, and social construction; the final chapter examines the future of pragmatism itself.

Howat considers whether appeals to truth should play a role in political discourse. He examines two kinds of response: that of Richard Rorty and his followers, and of “New Pragmatists” like Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse. Rorty rejected the idea of objective truth and hailed as “anti-authoritarian” the sort of pragmatism that sets that concept aside. Howat notes some overlap between Rorty’s position and that of Hannah Arendt, who didn’t reject the idea of truth itself but still argued against the use of that idea in political contexts. Unlike Rorty or Arendt, the New Pragmatists hold that the principal goal of political discourse is not agreement but rather a view that can withstand critical scrutiny – and according to the New Pragmatists, such a view can qualify as true. While tentatively aligning himself with the New Pragmatists and against Rorty, Howat argues that not all political discourse has truth as its aim. He also argues that it is unclear whether the New Pragmatist account of democracy, truth, and political discourse has the resources to deal adequately with the ways in which “our bounded rationality” allows us to be exploited.

Kraut describes the tendency of some contemporary pragmatists to understand humans and our place in the world in terms of inferential connections and social practices rather than in terms of correspondence between our words and thoughts and the facts that those words and thoughts purport to represent. That tendency leads to the view that the sorts of normativity by which our social practices are appropriately judged do not depend on human-independent facts. Kraut argues that if this is correct, then some recent work in social ontology is mistaken, namely, work that assumes that the difference between natural kinds and socially constructed kinds is relevant to questions of social justice. In emphasizing that such kinds are constructed, social constructionists hope to ameliorate the conditions of those of have historically faced injustice and oppression. Kraut argues that the ontology of social construction offers no aid in achieving that goal. The question of the ontological status of human kinds, and in particular the question whether kinds like gender are socially constructed, turns out to be “politically inert” and to have no bearing on matters of social justice.

Misak argues that, contra the once-popular “eclipse” narrative, pragmatism has always had periods of greater and of lesser respectability. The version of pragmatism that began with Charles Peirce and that continued with Frank Ramsey and C. I. Lewis “was always a vital part of analytic philosophy.” After Rorty’s appropriation of some of William James’s and John Dewey’s ideas, pragmatism began to ramify in ways some of which were inspired by the idea that “there is no getting away from the human when it comes to truth or any other concept of ours.” Setting aside questions about representational relations between words and things, new pragmatists sought to understand the concepts of meaning, truth, knowledge, etc. in terms of human agency and practices. Even newer pragmatists have brought this sensibility to bear on a wide range of philosophical issues and in law, medicine, and international relations. There has been a recent proliferation of excellent scholarly work on classical pragmatists and of work that excavates “the buried contribution of early women pragmatists” like Victoria Lady Welby and Margaret Macdonald. Misak concludes that the future of pragmatism is very bright.

Pragmatists have typically been more concerned with positive epistemic states (knowledge, warranted assertibility, etc.) than with the negative state of ignorance. Atkins, however, looks both to Charles Peirce and to C. I. Lewis in order to gain new insights into ignorance itself, into the conditions that keep us ignorant, and into the ways in which ignorance can be valuable. Atkins draws on Peirce’s account of our doxastic machinery – including how beliefs are formed and the various ways they become “fixed” – to formulate lessons about the kinds of information environments that can keep believers “mired in ignorance” and the virtues we should cultivate in order not to succumb to the forces that would keep us ignorant. Making use of Peirce’s and Lewis’s ideas about the good and the right, Atkins also maintains that ignorance is sometimes preferable to knowledge – in some circumstances, ignorance is instrumentally good and the right thing to do is to see that it be maintained.

Ambrosio reads Charles Peirce’s pragmatic maxim as inviting us to conduct experiments with our imaginations. On her account, the images that Peirce used to prompt his audience into such imaginative inquiry are tools that elicit imaginative activity. But since they are external and public, they also constrain that activity, resulting in shared habits that are subject to social criticism and thus to change. Ambrosio also considers John Dewey’s characterization of deliberation as “dramatic rehearsal” in the imagination of different possible courses of action. While she notes that Dewey’s approach to the imagination adds a moral dimension missing from Peirce’s, she sees the two pragmatists as united in the view that experimental imaginative activities are empirical and social with important material components. She also engages with contemporary work on the imagination, suggesting that contributors to recent debates on that topic would benefit from studying Peirce and Dewey.

Legg draws on Charles Peirce’s semiotics to help explain the semantic limitations of genAI software. Early AI developers were stymied by the assumption that meanings are discrete, abstract, and internal and by an approach that disallowed the growth of meaning. Legg describes some of the progress on AI that has been made in recent years but argues that some of its remaining weaknesses stem from a failure to understand that semiosis occurs in three fundamentally different ways: symbolicity, indexicality, and iconicity. Contemporary genAI systems never go beyond symbolicity to instantiate indexical signs, which are required to point to the world external to those systems, and they are not sufficiently constrained by iconic signs, especially those that would bring logical structure. Legg also critically considers claims that genAI will enable new achievements with regard to knowledge and truth, as well as claims that it will further erode our collective grasp on truth. Drawing on Peirce’s realism his view of inquiry as essentially social, Legg explains how we can reconceive reality, truth, and knowledge so as to avoid mistaking the texts created by genAI for genuine knowledge.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach of the book. Images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation.

de Waal considers both Christian fundamentalism and pragmatism as competing responses to what Nietzsche called “the death of God”: the demise of the concept of God that was central to both science and philosophy in the modern era. de Waal provides an account of the relation among religion, science, and philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that culminates in the demise of the idea of God as an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator and in science inheriting the social prestige that was once religion’s. The fundamentalists responded by maintaining that the only good science is that which is consistent with Scripture – unlike, e.g., the theory of evolution. Pragmatists responded by embracing the new science and responded to it with a passel of new philosophical ideas, e.g., Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, conceived as a test of meaningfulness for our concepts; his critical common-sensism, which allows us to take a critical position with regard to our common-sense beliefs; James’s denial of a ready-made world and his doctrine that it is sometimes permissible to believe in the absence of evidence; and fallibilism, which denies the possibility of certainty.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.