Pragmatism, Perfectionism, and Feminism :: Feminist Feminism Pragmatism Essays

Pragmatism, Perfectionism, and FeminismABSTRACT I consider the revision of realism by three leading neopragmatists Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and Cornel West. I argue that their vision of realism lacks a teleology, though a teleology is suggested by Bernsteins description of a pragmatical ethos. I appeal to Stanley Cavells notion of moral perfectionism to suggest a kind of teleology that is getable to pragmatism. Finally, I find the weakness of pragmatism done without teleology well exemplified in the exchange between Rorty and Nancy Frazer at Rortys 1990 Tanner Lecture. Rortys paper, Pragmatism and Feminism, was meant to offer feminists almost pragmatic strategies for improving their position. Frazers strong response finds Rortys suggestions only marginally helpful. I interpret her criticism of Rortys suggestions to be that they lack something like a teleology. To me, this suggests that pragmatism can learn from feminism. Pragmatism is revolutionary both in the reek of be ing a philosophy that is critical, destabilizing, and progressive, as well as in the sense of being a philosophy that, in the turning philosophic tides, has come back. Pragmatism was eclipsed in the first half of the twentieth one C by analytic philosophy, in its various forms, but in the dwell decade or so pragmatism has softened in full force, and with an explicitly philosophical agenda. In this paper I will examine this tonic wave of philosophical pragmatism, sometimes referred to as neopragmatism, as it appears in the whole caboodle of three of its leading proponents, Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Richard Bernstein and specifically, how it compares to, contrasts with, and contributes to feminism, as illustrated in the exchange between Rorty and Nancy Fraser that occurred as part of Rortys 1990 Tanner Lecture. A difficulty that arises in talk of the town about pragmatism, new or old, is that pragmatism comes in so many another(prenominal) forms. For Rorty, the most infl uential of the neopragmatists, pragmatism is primarily anti-philosophical. He defines its role in terms of negations it is anti-representational, anti-universalist, and anti-foundational. One of Rortys descriptions of what pragmatists do is, pragmatists keep trying to find shipway of making antiphilosophical points in nonphilosophical language. (1) For Cornel West, pragmatism represents a kind of die to philosophy, a return, that is, from a false to a genuine philosophy. It is a return to a philosophy that, at last, addresses the loci of our real needs. In his impressive, The American default of Philosophy A Genealogy of Pragmatism, West describes the return to pragmatism as follows