Ideals after the “Pragmatic Turn”

Abstract

In his recent volume, The Pragmatic Turn, eminent American philoso- pher, Richard J. Bernstein makes a compelling case for rethinking main- stream accounts of the history of philosophy in the past century and a half. Bernstein does this with characteristic precision, depth of insight, an impressive control of the material, and, it must be said, apparent ease. The central thesis of the book is that the classical American prag- matists — that is, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead — are responsible for initiating “a fundamental change of philosophical orientation” (Bernstein 19) that anticipated in profound and still illuminating ways many of the insights of some of the most influential American and European philosophers of the past century, specifically, those post-”linguistic turn” philosophers of roughly the past half century or so. By Bernstein’s reckoning, this shift in orien- tation is nothing short of a philosophical “sea change.”