If it works, its Pragmatism

Listened to a few more lectures today, not as much as I would have liked because I had to pop into work today.  The course I would like to mention from my collection is quite a tough one and it is called “Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida” taught by Professor Lawrence Cahoone, Ph.D. of Stony Brook University.

The particular lecture is Lecture number 17 Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy—Pragmatism.  I think this particular course gets down to the knitty gritty of a most difficult and abstract subject, that being philosophy. I loved how he lectured on Hegel’s philosophy, which is on the idea and how history makes an impact on society.  I always find Hegel very difficult to understand.  Still this lecture on Pragmatism is rather challenging.
 

Lawrence gives us an introduction to the three great movements of philosophy starting from Pragmatism, Phenomenology and then Existentialism. We then look into why such philosophical movements were labelled as radical and moving away from the traditional area of philosophizing.  Most of the lecture is on Charles Sanders Peirce and it looks at his discoveries and arguments against the idea that we can know all that there is to know about anything.  Peirce was critical with many of the foundations of philosophy and basically wanted to start from another angle.

Pragmatism started over in the states and some of its major functions rested upon the importance of testing statements for truth claims in accordance to how they are accepted by others in society.  Ideas, belief and statements are only useful if they work.   Pragmatists will not waste too much time on the metaphysical realm and would rather want explanations on ideas that have value to us.  Our experience of things that are useful to our everyday lives is what pragmatists wanted to pursue. 

Apart from Charles Sanders Pierce, there were other contributions to pragmatism from philosophers being William James, John Dewy and later on W.V Quine.  I must remind you this lecture can be quite challenging and Pragmatism compared itself to many other philosophies and ideas.  So this is one lecture you will be listening to more than once.