Pragmatism as Transition Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. Espousing a practical philosophy that urges us to focus on improving our lives, classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, argued that we should heed the rich lessons of experience. More recent neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, have argued against experience-based philosophy in favor of a linguistic turn. Consequently, American pragmatism today has become divided against itself.

In an effort to reconcile these two camps and revitalize this critical tradition, Colin Koopman recovers the "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity that flourished in the work of the early pragmatists and connects them to the transitionalist currents of neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, by concentrating on this thread, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of American pragmatism and builds new bridges to the work of such modern theorists as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. Through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of experience, knowledge, truth, ethics, politics, and critique takes shape, and, in conclusion, Koopman integrates Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further heals the rift between the analytic and continental schools.