American Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance

American Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance

Topics in the History of Philosophy (PHI 556)

Fall Semester 2020, Monday 1-3:40pm

Venue:

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, Mead and Dewey. At the same time it will explore the influence and contemporary relevance of pragmatist philosophy, particular 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

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, Mead 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 sessions 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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Themes

Peirce's Ontology and the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (Boler) (BS)

Peirce on Habit and the Ontology of Dispositions (BS)

American Pragmatism and Its Reception in Germany: Scheler and Gehlen (JL)

The New Realism (JL)

American Pragmatism and Behaviorism (BS and JL)

E. B. Holt and J. J. Gibson: Pragmatism and the Origins of Ecological Psychology (BS and JL)

Kurt Lewin's Field Theory and Roger Barker

Gibson's Theory of Perception and the Ontology of Affordances (BS)

Roger Barker and the Ontology of Behavior Settings (BS)

Peirce's Theory of Dicisigns (BS)

Mead's Influence on German Sociology (Gehlen, Habermas, Joas) (JL)

The Crisis of Psychology (JL)

Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism (BS)

Pragmatism and the Origin of Speech Act Theory (BS)

Rorty and the End of American Philosophy (JL)

Background Reading: Primary Sources

Toyoshima, Fumiaki and Barton, Adrien. "A Formal Representation of Affordances as Reciprocal Dispositions, TriCoLore (C3GI/ISD/SCORE), 2018.

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.]

Gibson (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

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.]

Introduction to Watson (1913) by Christopher D. Green

Commentary on Watson (1913) by Robert H. Wozniak

Background Reading: Secondary Literature

Michael K. Bergman, Hierarchy from the perspective of Peirce

Bitterman, M. E. 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

J. F. Boler, Peirce on the Medievals: Realism, Power and Form

Caruana, Fausto 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.

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.

Bernard Guerin, Gibson, Skinner and Perceptual Responses, Behavior and Philosophy, Spring/Summer 1990, Vol. 18, Number 1

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

Jia, Hongwei Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), Chinese Semiotic Studies 15(1): 1–14.

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)

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]

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

Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (open access) [On Peirce]

Barry Smith (2000) “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]

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

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

August 30: What Makes American Philosophy Unique

Classical Figures

Charles Sanders Peirce

William James

John Dewey

George Herbert Mead

Richard Rorty

September 20: The Metaphysics and Theory of Signs of C. S. Peirce

Reading: Boler

September 24-25 Weekend Course: Pragmatism and German Philosophy

Saturday Morning American Philosophy and Positivism

F. C. S. Schiller and William James (JL)

Reading: Mulligan on how the physicists (Mach, Boltzmann, Hertz, ...) influenced the pragmatists

Saturday Afternoon

The History of Psychology in Germany and America

E. B. Holt

E. Thorndike

B. Skinner

K. Koffka

J. J. Gibson

Sunday Morning American Philosophy in Germany

Scheler, Gehlen, Habermas

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

The Motor Theory of Perception (from Peirce to Merleau-Ponty)

Gibson

September 27:

American Pragmatism and Behaviorism (JL)

Reading: Thorndike, 1931

October 18:

The Crisis of Psychology

1: Behaviorism, the Ideal of Objective Psychology and the Replicability Crisis

2: Peirce's Idea of Objective Truth and the Reasons for Its Failure

Reading: Bitterman, Classical Conditioning Since Pavlov

October 25:

Ecological Psychology in Context : James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism

E. B. Holt, J. J. Gibson and the Ontology of Affordances

Roger Barker and the Ontology of Behavior Settings

Reading: Heft

November 1:

G. H. Mead, Charles W. Morris and the Development of the Theory of Signs

Reading: Hongwei Jia, Foundations of the Theory of Signs

November 15:

Richard Rorty: The Last Pragmatist

Reading: Munz

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

Important Dates

Sep 7	- about now start to discuss by email the content of your essay or essays with Dr Smith
Sep 14	- submit proposed title and abstract
Sep 28	- submit a table of contents and 300 word summary plus draft of associated ppt slides
Oct 15	- 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)
Dec 7	- 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.

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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.

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