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.

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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

Slides

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 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

Slides

Video

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

Slides

Video

Reading: Mulligan "How to Marry Phenomenology and Pragmatism"

10:30am Peirce, Truthmaking, and Kantianism

Presentation by Frederik Stjernfelt, Copenhagen

Slides

Video

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

Slides

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

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

Carl Stumpf

Wolfgang Köhler

Max Wertheimer

Kurt Koffka

Kurt Lewin

Roger Barker

Fritz Heider

Prague School, Christian von Ehrenfels

Sunday Morning

9am Peirce's Semiotics

Presentation by Frederik Stjernfelt, Copenhagen

Slides

Video

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

Slides

Video

3:00pm Codas on Dewey, Mead and Leibniz

September 27: Pragmatism and German philosophy (continued)

Pragmatism from Scheler to Habermas. Part 2

Slides

Video

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

Slides

Video

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

Slides

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

Slides

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

Slides

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

Slides

Video

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

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

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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.

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Counseling Services: 120 Richmond Quad (North Campus), phone 716-645-2720

Health Services: Michael Hall (South Campus), phone: 716-829-3316

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