Perhaps the most significant development in American philosophy in the late 20th century has been the extraordinary renaissance of pragmatism, marked most notably by the reformulations of the so-called ""neopragmatists"" Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. With pragmatism offering the allure of potentially resolving the impasse between epistemological realists and antirealists, analytic and continental philosophers, as well as thinkers across the disciplines, have been energized and engaged by this movement. In this volume Hildebrand asks two questions: first, how faithful are the neopragmatists' reformulations of classical pragmatism (particularly Deweyan pragmatism); and, second, and more significantly, can their neopragmatism work?
David L. Hildebrand teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado at Denver.
"Pragmatism was 'revived' in the 1970s and 1980s and was led at once into philosophical dead ends that John Dewey had already skillfully dismantled. Now, David Hildebrand corrects the record; provides an informed, splendidly argued, indispensable part of the recovery of Dewey's analysis of realism—still hardly bettered by anyone today."—Joseph Margolis, Temple University