Pragmatist Variations on Ethical and Intercultural Life

This is a book about pragmatism, intercultural philosophy, and ethics that attempts to bring to the fore the variations on the ethical and intercultural life of pragmatism, based on readings of William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To this foursome is added the leading feminist thinker of our age, Luce Irigaray.

The book is a contribution to the fields of pragmatism, intercultural philosophy, and social and political ethics. The argument in the book runs along two lines: firstly, four pragmatist philosophers (William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger) are discussed by putting them into their respective intercultural contexts. They are interpreted as philosophers that were/are either explicitly or implicitly linked to some of the key tenets in comparative and/or intercultural philosophy of the twentieth/twenty-first century. Secondly, the book looks to their particular works and discusses the role of the body and its important ethical potential. In their respective contexts, it looks at the possibilities for linking James, Dewey, Rorty, and Unger to the original idea of the interculturally oriented ethical pragmatism. In this endeavor, the book also approaches the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer, Luce Irigaray, and Enrique Dussel in order to show their importance for a historical and contemporary (feminist and intercultural/global) debate about the philosophy of American pragmatism. The book concludes with two chapters — i.e. with a discussion of Irigaray’s ‘ethical pragmatism’ and finally with some reflections on contemporary Slovenian and French philosophy (Žižek, Badiou) as linked to the communism-democracy controversy. In both cases, again, pragmatist and intercultural methods are employed and the role of the body in their respective oeuvres is reflected.