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TF: Pragmatism was the dominant philosophical movement in the United States from the Civil War through World War II. True TF: Jeremy Bentham is one of the theorists associated with altruism.
_____ was the dominant philosophical movement in the United States from the Civil War through World War II. Pragmatism According to ______, what is right for one is right for all.
A philosophy that stresses the intimate relation between thought and action by defining the meaning of our conceptions in terms of the practical effects we associate with them and the truth of our beliefs in terms of how successfully they guide our actions.
- Overview
- Major theses of philosophic pragmatism
pragmatism, school of philosophy, dominant in the United States in the first quarter of the 20th century, based on the principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are the criteria of their merit. It stresses the priority of action over doctrine, of experience over fixed principles, and it holds that ideas borrow their meanings from their consequences and their truths from their verification. Thus, ideas are essentially instruments and plans of action.
Achieving results, i.e., “getting things done” in business and public affairs, is often said to be “pragmatic.” There is a harsher and more brutal connotation of the term in which any exercise of power in the successful pursuit of practical and specific objectives is called “pragmatic.” The character of American business and politics is often so described. In these cases “pragmatic” carries the stamp of justification: a policy is justified pragmatically if it is successful. The familiar and the academic conceptions have in common an opposition to invoking the authority of precedents or of abstract and ultimate principles. Thus, in law judicial decisions that have turned on the weighing of consequences and probable general welfare rather than on being deduced from precedents have been called pragmatic.
During the first quarter of the 20th century, pragmatism was the most influential philosophy in the United States, exerting an impact on the study of law, education, political and social theory, art, and religion. Six fundamental theses of this philosophy can be distinguished. It is, however, unlikely that any one thinker would have subscribed to them all, and even on points of agreement, varying interpretations mark the thought and temper of the major pragmatists. The six theses are:
1. Responsive to idealism and evolutionary theory, pragmatists emphasized the “plastic” nature of reality and the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and controlling it. Existence is fundamentally concerned with action, which some pragmatists exalted to an almost metaphysical level. Change being an inevitable condition of life, pragmatists called attention to the ways in which change can be directed for individual and social benefit. They were consequently most critical of moral and metaphysical doctrines in which change and action are relegated to the “merely practical,” on the lowest level of the hierarchy of values. Some pragmatists anticipated the more concrete and life-centred philosophy of existentialism by arguing that only in acting—confronted with obstacles, compelled to make choices, and concerned with giving form to experience—is the individual’s being realized and discovered.
2. Pragmatism was a continuation of critical empiricism in emphasizing the priority of actual experience over fixed principles and a priori (nonexperiential) reasoning in critical investigation. For James this meant that the pragmatist
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turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action.…It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against…dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.
Some historians have argued that pragmatism was a philosophical response to the horrors of the Civil War. The early pragmatists were veterans of that bloody conflict, and those who came later had seen siblings, parents, and neighbors wounded or killed.
Aug 16, 2008 · Putnam identifies four key characteristics of pragmatism as: i) rejection of skepticism, ii) willingness to embrace fallibilism, iii) rejection of dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body, analytic/synthetic, iv) what he calls ‘the primacy of practice’ (Putnam 1993; 1994).
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Pragmatism is best understood as a school of thought born from a rejection of metaphysical thinking and the traditional philosophical pursuits of truth and objectivity. The Socratic and Platonic theories that form the basis of a large portion of Western philosophical thought aim to find and explain the “essences” of reality and undercover ...