American Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance
American Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance
Topics in the History of Philosophy (PHI 556)
Fall Semester 2021, Monday 1-3:40pm
Venue: Park 141 (including on September 25-26, Park 141)
Registration: Class#: 24202
Course Description: This course will provide an introduction to the pragmatist tradition of American philosophy. It will focus on the philosophical ideas of the leading figures of this movement, including Peirce, James, and Dewey. At the same time it will explore the influence and contemporary relevance of pragmatist philosophy, particularly as concerns developments in psychology, and in the social sciences. The course will include a two-day intense weekend session focusing on the influence of American pragmatism on 20th-century German philosophy.
Instructors: Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, with contributions by Anthony Chemero, Harry Heft, John Sowa and Frederik Stjernfelt
Prerequisites: Open to all persons with an undergraduate degree and some knowledge of philosophy.
Office hours: By appointment via email at phismith@buffalo.edu
The Course
Course Description: This course will provide an introduction to the pragmatist tradition of American philosophy. It will focus on the philosophical ideas of the leading figures of this movement, including Peirce, James, and Dewey. At the same time it will explore the influence and contemporary relevance of pragmatist philosophy, particularly as concerns developments in psychology and in the social sciences. The course will include a two-day intense weekend seminar focusing on the influence of American pragmatism on 20th-century German philosophy.
Course Structure: This is a three credit hour graduate seminar.
The final session will be structured around powerpoint presentations by the students in the class. These presentations will be recorded.
Target Audience: The course is open to all interested students with an undergraduate degree and some knowledge of philosophy.
August 30: Pragmatism: An Overview
Introduction to this Course
- Methodology for the history of philosophy
- The four phases of philosophy
- Peirce and The Monist
Introduction to American Philosophy
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- William James
- John Dewey
- George Herbert Mead
- Richard Rorty
- Susan Haack
Video (with apologies for poor quality)
Reading:
- Cornelis de Waal, Introducing Pragmatism, Taylor & Francis, 2021
- Susan Haack, "Pragmatism Old and New" (2006).
- C. Legg, "Pragmatism", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
September 6: Labor Day Observed
September 13: No class
September 20: The Metaphysics of C. S. Peirce
- An introduction to truthmaking
- The metaphysical realism of Duns Scotus
- Peirce's metaphysical realism
- Peirce and chemical diagrams
- Peirce on modality
- Peirce on the continuum
- Peirce and mereology
- Peirce and Brentano on the medievals
- Boler, Peirce and the Medievals
- Campbell, The Chemistry of Relations
- Pihlström, "Truthmaking And Pragmatist Conceptions Of Truth And Reality".
- Rorty, Review of Boler
- Smith, "Characteristica Universalis"
- Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology
- Stjernelt, "Mereology and Semiotics"
Peirce on the Classification of the Sciences
- What is science?
- What is logic?
- What is mathematics?
- The taxonomy of scientific models
Readings:
- Torjus Midtgarden, Peirce’s classification of the sciences
- Denis Fisette, Stumpf and the classification of the sciences
September 25-26 Weekend Course: Pragmatism and German Philosophy
Venue: 280 Park Hall
Saturday Morning
9am Pragmatism and Positivism
- Reading: Mulligan "How to Marry Phenomenology and Pragmatism"
10:30am Peirce, Truthmaking, and Kantianism
Readings:
- F. Stjernfelt, "Peirce as Truthmaker Realist"
- F. Stjernfelt, "The Riddle of Dependences: How to connect entities, across pragmatism, phenomenology, and structuralism"
Saturday Afternoon
1pm Pragmatism and Neopositivism
2:45pm The History of Psychology in Germany and America
From Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory
- Leipzig School, Wilhelm Wundt
- Hugo Münsterberg
- Oswald Külpe
- Karl Bühler
- E. B. Titchener
- E. G. Boring
- George Herbert Mead
- C. S. Peirce
- Harvard School, William James
- Edwin B. Holt
- J. J. Gibson
- Edwin B. Holt
- Behaviorism
- E. Thorndike
- J. B. Watson
- Edwin Bissell Holt
- B. F. Skinner
- Ernst Mach
- Vienna School, Franz Brentano
- Edmund Husserl
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- J. J. Gibson
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Carl Stumpf
- Wolfgang Köhler
- Max Wertheimer
- Kurt Koffka
- Kurt Lewin
- Roger Barker
- Fritz Heider
- Roger Barker
- Prague School, Christian von Ehrenfels
- Edmund Husserl
Sunday Morning
9am Peirce's Semiotics
Reading: F. Stjernfelt: "Co-localization as the Syntax of Multimodal Propositions: An Amazing Peircean Idea and Some Implications for the Semiotics of Truth"
11:00am Pragmatist Theories of Truth
- Truth as Successful Action (Mead: When somebody has a problem and the solution of the problem is the truth)
- Truth as Successful Group Action and the Developing of the Self through Communication (Royce, Mead and Habermas)
- Habermas: Truth Emerges When People Speak Long Enough to Achieve a Consensus
Sunday Afternoon
1:00pm American Philosophy in Germany
- Pragmatism from Scheler to Habermas. Part 1
- Slides
2:00pm Ontology of Niches, Affordances, Settings, Places, Habitats: From Aristotle to Gibson and Barker and the Hutchinsonian Niche
3:00pm Codas on Dewey, Mead and Leibniz
September 27: Pragmatism and German philosophy (continued)
October 4: No class
October 11: No class
October 18: No class
October 25: Ecological Psychology in Context
Harry Heft, author of Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism:
1: Radical empiricism and the ontology of affordances
2. Behavior settings as emergent relational structures in everyday life
Readings:
- Heft, "Perceptual Information of 'An Entirely Different Order'"
- Heft, "Places: Widening the Scope of an Ecological Approach to Perception"
- Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context
- Smith, "Toward a Realistic Science of Environments"
- Smith, "Objects and Their Environments: From Aristotle to Ecological Psychology"
November 1: From Pragmatism to Radical Embodiment
Anthony Chemero (University of Cincinatti) Enactivism, Embodiment, Ecological Psychology
Readings:
- A. Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 2009
- A. Chemero, "An Outline of a Theory of Affordances", Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181–195
- Rob Withagen and Anthony Chemero, "Affordances and classification: On the significance of a sidebar in James Gibson’s last book", Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 4, August 2012, 521–537
November 8: Peirce on Habits
Reading
- Fausto Caruana and Italo Testa (eds.) Habits: Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
November 15: Peirce on Diagrams / Rorty on Pragmatism
John Sowa: Natural logic is diagrammatic reasoning about mental models
Reading:
- John Sowa, "Peirce, Polya, and Euclid: Integrating logic, heuristics, and geometry"
- John Sowa,"Reasoning with diagrams and images", 2018
- John Sowa, "Natural logic is diagrammatic reasoning about mental models", 2020
Peirce on Logic and the Theory of Signs
- Peirce on logic
- Peirce and the theory of signs
- Peirce and mereology
- Peirce and chemical diagrams
Reading:
- Campbell, The Chemistry of Relations
- Smith, "Characteristica Universalis"
- Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology
- Stjernfelt, "Mereology and Semiotics"
- Sowa Peirce's Contributions to the 21st Century
Richard Rorty: The Last Pragmatist
Reading: Munz, Philosophy and the Mirror of Rorty
November 22: Student Projects
- 1:00pm Noah Kim: Pragmatism and Metaethics: A Peircean Approach to Moral Cognitivism
- 1:15pm Alec Sculley: Philosophy Actually
- 1:30pm Ali Hasanzadeh: The Role of Peirce’s Pragmatism in Modern Physics
- 1:45pm Famous Clark: Feminist Reparative Readings of Pragmatism
- 2:00pm Peihong (Karl) Xie: Does A Pragmatist Demystification of Truthmaking Succeed?
- 2:15pm Tiankui Zeng: Rorty escaping the game
- 2:30pm Robert Krieter: Counterfactual Intuitions and Actuality
- 2:45pm Hyemi Jun: Comparing Peirce and Descartes on Approaches to Justify Knowledge
- 3:00pm Finn Wilson: Peirce, Belief and Reference
November 29: No class
December 6: No class
Background Reading: Primary Literature
- Barker, Roger "On the Nature of the Environment", Journal of Social Issues, October 1963.
- Brock, Jarrett, "An Introduction to Peirce's Theory of Speech Acts", Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 17 (4), 1981, 319-326.
- Dewey, John. (1884). "The new psychology". Andover Review, 2, 278-289. [Possibly the first use of the phrase "new psychology."]
- Dewey, John. (1894). "The ego as cause". Philosophical Review, 3, 337-341.
- Dewey, John. (1896) "The reflex arc concept in psychology". Psychological Review, 3, 357-370. [The article that defined the modern concept of the reflex.]
- Dewey, John. (1938) Logic. The Theory of Inquiry
- Gibson, James J. (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
- Gibson, James J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
- Holt, Edwin Bissell (1931) Animal Drive and the Leaning Process. An Essay Toward Radical Empiricism
- Holt, E. B. et al. (1912) The New Realism
- James, William (1890). The Principles of Psychology.
- James, William, "Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking", in: Popular Lectures on Philosophy, Longmans, Green, and Co (1907)
- Langfeld, Herbert (1931) "A Response Interpretation of Consciousness", The Psychological Review, 38(2), 1931, 87-107.
- Mead, George H. (1913). "The social self". Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 10, 374-380. [Major article by the "social behaviorist"]
- Mead, George H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society
- Parsons, Talcott (1951) The Social System
- Peirce, C. S. "How to Make our Ideas Clear"
- Schiller, F. C. S. Humanism: Philosophical Essays
- Schiller, F. C. S. Studies in Humanism,
- Skinner, B. F. (1935). "Two types of conditioned reflex and a pseudo type". Journal of General Psychology, 12, 66-77. [Major statement of operant behaviorism.]
- Skinner, B. F. (1937). "Two types of conditioned reflex: A reply to Konorski and Miller". Journal of General Psychology, 16, 272-279. [Reply to major critique of Skinner (1935).]
- Skinner, B. F. (1950). "Are theories of learning necessary?", Psychological Review, 57, 193-216.
- Thorndike, Edward Human Learning, 1931
- Watson, John B. (1913). "Psychology as the behaviorist views it". Psychological Review, 20, 158-177. [The classic manifesto of behaviorism.]
Background Reading: Secondary Literature
- Michael K. Bergman, Hierarchy from the perspective of Peirce, Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization
- M. E. Bitterman Classical Conditioning Since Pavlov, Review of General Psychology, 2006, 10 (4), 365–376
- J. F. Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce's Relation to John Duns Scotus, University of Washington Press, I963
- J. F. Boler, Peirce on the Medievals: Realism, Power and Form
- Maria Brinker, "The Backside of Habit: Notes on Embodied Agency and the Functional Opacity of the Medium", in: Fausto Caruana & Italo Testa (eds.), Habits, 2020
- Chris Campbell, The Chemistry of Relations. The periodic table examined through the lens of C.S. Peirce’s philosophy, University College London, 2017
- Fausto Caruana and Italo Testa (eds.) Habits: Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Jorge Castro and Enrique Lafuente, “All You Need is Holt”—Is the Socio-cultural Phenomenon a Problem for a Neorealist Ecological Psychology?
- E. P. Charles, Seeing Minds in Behavior: Descriptive Mentalism, August 2011, Review of General Psychology 15(3):267-276.
- A. Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 2009
- A. Chemero, "[1] An Outline of a Theory of Affordances]", Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181–195
- Willard F. Day, On certain similarities between the Philosophical investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the operationism of B. F. Skinner, Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1969 May; 12(3): 489–506.
- Christopher D. Green, "Introduction to Watson (1913)"
- Bernard Guerin, Gibson, Skinner and Perceptual Responses, Behavior and Philosophy, Spring/Summer 1990, Vol. 18, Number 1
- Susan Haack, "Pragmatism Old and New" (2006).
- Henry Jackman, "James' Pragmatic Account of Intentionality and Truth", Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 34, No. 1, 1998, 155-181
- Peter Hare, G. H. Mead's Metaphysics of Sociality, Dissertation, Columbia University, 1965
- Peter Hare, Neglected American Philosophers in the History of Symbolic Interactionism [on Mead's precursors Chauncey Wright and Josiah Royce]
- Harry Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context : James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism
- Harry Heft, "Perceptual Information of 'An Entirely Different Order': The 'Cultural Environment' in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems", Ecological Psychology, 29 (2), 2017, 122-145
- Heft, Harry, "Places: Widening the Scope of an Ecological Approach to Perception–Action With an Emphasis on Child Development", Ecological Psychology, 30, 2018, 99-123
- Hongwei Jia Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), Chinese Semiotic Studies 15(1): 1–14.
- Catherine Legg and Joshua Black “What is Intelligence For? A Peircean Pragmatist Response to the Knowing‑How, Knowing‑That Debate”, Erkenntnis, 2020.
- Willem J. M. Levelt, Speech Acts and Functions, ch. 9 of Levelt, A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era, Oxford University Press, 2013 [on Bühler and speech act theory]
- Peter T. Manicas, "John Dewey and American Psychology", Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32:30021–8308
- Edward C. Moore, "The Scholastic Realism of C. S. Peirce", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 1952, 12 (3), 406-417
- Kevin Mulligan, "How to Marry Phenomenology and Pragmatism - Scheler's Proposal", Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide, Edited by Maria Baghramian and Sarin Marchetti, Routledge, 2018, 37-64
- Peter Munz, Philosophy and the Mirror of Rorty, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 14 (2):195-238 (1984)
- Thomas Natsoulas Gibson's Environment, Husserl's "Lebenswelt," the World of Physics, and the Rejection of Phenomenal Objects, The American Journal of Psychology, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 327-358
- Sami Pihlström, "Truthmaking And Pragmatist Conceptions Of Truth And Reality". Minerva (2005) 9:105-133.
- Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (open access) [On Peirce]
- Richard Rorty, Review of Boler on Scholastic Realism
- John Sowa, "Peirce, Polya, and Euclid: Integrating logic, heuristics, and geometry"
- John Sowa,"Reasoning with diagrams and images", 2018
- John Sowa, "Natural logic is diagrammatic reasoning about mental models", 2020
- John Sowa "Peirce's Contributions to the 21st Century".
- Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Munich, 1988.
- Barry Smith, "Characteristica Universalis", in K. Mulligan (ed.), Language, Truth and Ontology, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1992, 48–77.
- Barry Smith, "Toward a Realistic Science of Environments", Ecological Pschology 21 (2), April-June 2009, 121-130
- Barry Smith “Objects and Their Environments: From Aristotle to Ecological Psychology”, in Andrew Frank, Jonathan Raper and Jean-Paul Cheylan (eds.), The Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units (GISDATA 8), London: Taylor and Francis, 2001, 79–97. [On Roger Barker on behavior settings]
- Frederik Stjernfelt, "Mereology and Semiotics", Sign Systems Studies 28:73-97 (2000)
- Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology, Springer, 2007
- Frederik Stjernfelt, "Peirce as Truthmaker Realist"Signs Conveying Information: On the Range of Peirce's Notion of Propositions – Dicisigns", in: Empirical Research on Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric, 2018 (pp.177-192)
- Frederik Stjernfelt,"Riddle of Dependences. How to connect entities, across pragmatism, phenomenology, and structuralism"
- Frederik Stjernfelt: "Co-localization as the Syntax of Multimodal Propositions: An Amazing Peircean Idea and Some Implications for the Semiotics of Truth"
- Fumiaki Toyoshima and Adrien Barton "A Formal Representation of Affordances as Reciprocal Dispositions", TriCoLore (C3GI/ISD/SCORE), 2018
- Rob Withagen and Anthony Chemero Affordances and classification: On the significance of a sidebar in James Gibson’s last book, Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 4, August 2012, 521–537
- Robert H. Wozniak, "Commentary on Watson (1913)"
Background Reading: Repositories
- Mead Project Inventory: see especially items by Dewey, E. B. Holt, and G. H. Mead
- Peirce resources
- Harry Heft: Works
- Munich Schedule of Lectures on Peirce
- Frederik Stjernfelt on Peirce
- E. P. Charles' papers on Holt
- Classics in the History of Psychology
Student Learning Outcomes
| Program Outcomes/Competencies | Instructional Method(s) | Assessment Method(s) |
|---|---|---|
| The student will acquire a knowledge of the history of American philosophy, of its influence on the development of psychology and the social sciences, and of its contemporary relevance. | Lectures and class discussions | Review of reading matter and associated online content and participation in class discussions |
| The student will acquire experience in using the methods employed in intellectual history, especially as applied to philosophical theories and systems | Participation in practical experiments | Review of results |
| The student will acquire experience in communicating the results of work in the history of philosophy in such a way as to demonstrate their contemporary relevance. | Creation of youtube presentation and of associated documentation | Review of results |
How to Write an Essay
- Jordan Peterson's Essay Writing Guide
- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style, Penguin Books, 2014
- Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
- Harvard's guide to writing philosophy
- Jim Pryor's guide to writing philosophy
Important Dates
| Sep 7 | - about now start to discuss by email the content of your essay or essays with Dr Smith |
| Sep 25 | - submit proposed title and abstract |
| Oct 10 | - submit a table of contents and 300 word summary plus draft of associated ppt slides |
| Oct 20 | - submit first draft of essay (~1000 words) and associated powerpoint (~10 slides) |
| Nov 15 | - submit second draft of essay (~2000 words) and associated powerpoint (~10 slides) |
| Nov 22 | - class presentation |
| Dec 11 | - submit final version of essay and powerpoint and upload final version of video to youtube |
Grading
Grading will be based on two factors:
I: understanding and criticism of the material presented in classes 1-13
All students are required to take an active part in class (and where relevant on-line) discussions throughout the semester.
II: preparation of an essay, and associated powerpoint slides and recorded presentation.
Content and structure of the essay should be discussed with Dr Smith.
Grading Policy: Grading follows standard Graduate School policies. Grades will be weighted according to the following breakdown:
Weighting Assignment
- 20% - class discussions
- 15% - youtube video presentation
- 15% - powerpoint slides
- 50% - essay
Final Grades
Percentages refer to sum of assignment grades as listed above
Grade Quality Percentage
| A | 4.0 | 90.0% -100.00% |
| A- | 3.67 | 87.0% - 89.9% |
| B+ | 3.33 | 84.0% - 86.9% |
| B | 3.00 | 80.0% - 83.9% |
| B- | 2.67 | 77.0% - 79.9% |
| C+ | 2.33 | 74.0% - 76.9% |
| C | 2.00 | 71.0% - 73.9% |
| C- | 1.67 | 68.0% - 70.9% |
| D+ | 1.33 | 65.0% - 67.9% |
| D | 1.00 | 62.0% - 64.9% |
| F | 0 | 61.9% or below |
An interim grade of Incomplete (I) may be assigned if the student has not completed all requirements for the course. An interim grade of 'I' shall not be assigned to a student who did not attend the course. The default grade accompanying an interim grade of 'I' shall be 'U' and will be displayed on the UB record as 'IU.' The default Unsatisfactory (U) grade shall become the permanent course grade of record if the 'IU' is not changed through formal notice by the instructor upon the student's completion of the course.
Assignment of an interim 'IU' is at the discretion of the instructor. A grade of 'IU' can be assigned only if successful completion of unfulfilled course requirements can result in a final grade better than the default 'U' grade. The student should have a passing average in the requirements already completed. The instructor shall provide the student specification, in writing, of the requirements to be fulfilled.
The university’s Graduate Incomplete Policy can be found here.
Related Policies and Services
Academic integrity is a fundamental university value. Through the honest completion of academic work, students sustain the integrity of the university while facilitating the university's imperative for the transmission of knowledge and culture based upon the generation of new and innovative ideas. See http://grad.buffalo.edu/Academics/Policies-Procedures/Academic-Integrity.html.
Accessibility resources: If you have any disability which requires reasonable accommodations to enable you to participate in this course, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources in 60 Capen Hall, 645-2608 and also the instructor of this course during the first week of class. The office will provide you with information and review appropriate arrangements for reasonable accommodations, which can be found on the web here.
University suppert services: Students are often unaware of university support services. For example, the Center for Excellence in Writing provides support for written work, and several tutoring centers on campus provide academic success support and resources.
Available resources on sexual assault: UB is committed to providing an environment free of all forms of discrimination and sexual harassment, including sexual assault, domestic and dating violence and stalking. If you have experienced gender-based violence (intimate partner violence, attempted or completed sexual assault, harassment, coercion, stalking, etc.), UB has resources to help. This includes academic accommodations, health and counseling services, housing accommodations, helping with legal protective orders, and assistance with reporting the incident to police or other UB officials if you so choose. Please contact UB’s Title IX Coordinator at 716-645-2266 for more information. For confidential assistance, you may also contact a Crisis Services Campus Advocate at 716-796-4399.
Counseiling services: As a student you may experience a range of issues that can cause barriers to learning or reduce your ability to participate in daily activities. These might include strained relationships, anxiety, high levels of stress, alcohol/drug problems, feeling down, health concerns, or unwanted sexual experiences. Counseling, Health Services, and Health Promotion are here to help with these or other concerns. You learn can more about these programs and services by contacting:
- Counseling Services: 120 Richmond Quad (North Campus), phone 716-645-2720
- Health Services: Michael Hall (South Campus), phone: 716-829-3316
- Health Promotion: 114 Student Union (North Campus), phone: 716- 645-2837
