Practicing Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism, edited by Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński

Abstract

Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski, ed. Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism. Brill. 2015. 132 + xiv pp. ISBN 9789004301986 (paperback).Practicing Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism is a recent collection of essays edited by Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski. essays, taken individually, are fascinating, but the pieces do not speak each other enough feel like a coherent volume. I say this not criticize the volume, but rather explain the form this review takes. Instead of discussing the volume in general terms, I have opted for a summary of each article.In John Lachs's contribution, The Obligations of Philosophers, he asks about the obligations philosophers incur by taking material support from the public. In other words, what ought we do earn our checks? While many might think that philosophers' professional obligations are exhausted by mentoring students and going faculty meetings, Lachs has a longer list. These range from the banal and too opt-repeated adage avoid jargon more tendentious claims resist communism more interesting suggestions. For instance, Lachs urges philosophers be fallibilists, acknowledge the freedom we exercise in conceptualizing, and acting in, the world, and display the courage to speak up when central values are in danger (p. 8). No doubt, these obligations tug on one another. (If the world does not dictate how it is be conceptualized, we cannot be wrong about our preferred conceptualizations, so why should we be fallibilists about these? If we are fallibilists about our value judgments, why should we ever act as though we are certain that a value has been wrongly threatened and requires our defense?) Though such tensions may be ineliminable, Lachs is surely right that navigating them is essential for being a good philosopher. Whether one likes his specific answers or not, Lachs poses an important question. What should philosophers do earn their keep? In an age when is endangered within the academy, this question has perhaps never had more relevance.Prolegomena Pragmatist Conception of the Good is Emil Visňovský's contribution the volume. Though the article gets off a slow start, mentioning - not really probing - lots of well-known views about the good life and the good society, Visňovský ends the article on a high note, articulating a pragmatist vision of the good life, one that is flexible, imaginative, pluralistic, anti-dogmatic and non-hedonistic (p. 28). While I found this vision quite compelling, I also found myself wondering at the end: If this is the pragmatist vision, in what sense is Visňovský's text a prolegomenon? Prolegomena are expository preludes a longer discussion. On Visňovský's view, however, pragmatists will not have any general, pre-packaged prescriptions on how live, so there should be no tome or treatise for which his remarks serve as introduction. A pragmatist treatise on the good life is a contradiction in terms. This wrinkle aside, Visňovský offers an attractive vision of how pursue the good life, a vision that is strongly rooted in both classical and more contemporary pragmatist thought.Why, in American thought, have people traditionally understood as a way of life, and not as a for detached, academic study? That question animates Kenneth W. Stikkers's contribution, Practicing Philosophy in the Experience of Living: Philosophy as a Way of Life in the American Philosophical Tradition. Stikkers ventures two answers. First, he argues that, throughout American thought from Puritanism pragmatism, one finds a different ontological framework than one finds in Europe, and he further suggests that this difference enabled American thinkers resist Europe's epistemologycentered view of philosophy, which goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy as subject view. Second, Stikkers points a long history of American being practiced beyond the academy. …