Pragmatism and analysis: different points of view
by Prof. Michele Marsonet Many thinkers nowadays react against the strictures of the analytic tradition by reviving the American philosophy par excellence: pragmatism. The forerunner of this trend of thought in the second half of the past century is Quine, even though he has never been a full-fledged pragmatist: his stance is better pictured by saying that he inserted pragmatist elements in a largely analytic (and even logical empiricist) stance. Following Quine we find Rescher, who began re-evaluating pragmatism in the late 1960’s. Rescher’…
THE PROTOSINGULARITY MODEL
On human deep thinking (read an extract) Following the radical renewal brought to modern physics by Albert Einstein's equations, which redefined the fundamental categories of spacetime and gravitation; following the Quantum Revolution of 1927, which embraced indeterminism and confronted human reason with a nature that proved irreducible to the categories of absolute causality and unconditional objectivity, the contemporary scientific age is inexorably steering humanity toward technical frontiers that stand entirely beyond the reach of …
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Political Pluralism according to Pragmatism
by Prof. Michele Marsonet Pragmatists always had clear ideas about the relations between the natural and the social worlds. Most of them tell us, first of all, that human beings have evolved within nature as creatures that solve their survival problems through intelligence. The emergence of intelligence, on the other hand, must not be seen as a purpose of nature itself, but rather as our functional version of survival mechanisms such as physical force or numerousness. The systematic use of this intelligence in a context which is eminently so…
