2022 marked the 40th anniversary of Cornell West’s Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. 2024 will mark the 20th anniversary of Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. Both of these monumental texts have been extremely influential on Pragmatic thought and action for decades. The panelists reflect on the relevance of these texts for contemporary social action and how Social Pragmatism either draw on these resources to address novel problems or move beyond these paradigms or articulating novel advances. In that vein, West and Stout’s work on social Pragmatism will be placed in dialogue with metaphysical Pragmatism.
Benjamin Chicka’s 2022 book God the Created: Pragmatic Constructive Realism in Philosophy and Theology attempts to synthesize several lines of thought typically understood as antithetical to one another, proposing a revised version of Peirce’s Pragmatism as a third way forward through these debates to learn from disagreements rather than simply dismissing the opponent(s)’s position(s).
In recognition of the 40th anniversary of Cornel West’s Prophesy Deliverance!, the 30th anniversary of Race Matters, plus the near-20th anniversary of Democracy Matters and Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, I attempt to read these foundational texts together. All exploit the Pragmatist reading of Hegel as the philosopher who transcended the Cartesian/Kantian subject with a social-historical subject. All use Rorty’s 1982 Consequences of Pragmatism. All view racism, secularism and certain sorts of nationalism as persistent threats to the essential force of democratic solidarity across lines of difference. All privilege hope over knowledge and the future over the present. All turn to artists for the cultivation of these sensibilities. More recently, both thinkers have turned to theorizing grass roots organizing and social activism. Together, they reveal the rich resources that Pragmatism can provide for current thinking about democracy, religion, and art as is evident in recent work they have inspired.
In recent years there has been much handwringing about our “post-truth” condition. I argue thatwe cannot call for a simple return to truth in our democratic discourse. This would only raise further questions about what it means to center truth in our politics: what is truth? What sort of truth are we talking about? And who defines what is true? One of the things that is at stake in how we answer these questions is the place of pluralism in our democracy. Revisiting Stout’s discussion of both truth and pluralism in Democracy and Tradition, I will argue that his notion of democracy as a social practice is still very much relevant to reviving our democratic tradition. I will propose expanding it by conceiving pluralism as a social practice that can make room for diverse understandings and ways of knowing, without completely sidelining questions of truth.
This paper relates the philosophy of Charles Taylor to the work of Jeffrey Stout in Democracy and Tradition. Stout did not include Taylor among the “religious voices in a pluralist society.” Yet, Taylor has detailed the move of western society from a default position of religious belief to a context in which religious belief is one option among many. In this context, Taylor lays out a social philosophy that requires democratic engagement and participation committed to a cultural pluralism. Due to the very nature of our secular age, we must do religious philosophy in a space that takes seriously a new "Jamesian open space," what he calls a cross pressured position. Taylor argues for engagement, dialogue, and pluralism in a secular society that protects and promotes equality and difference. Yet, in Taylor’s view this secularity is not an end unto itself, but a means to the proper social end.
This paper offers a critique of Benjamin Chicka’s Pragmatic Constructive Realism (PCR), as presented in God the Created: Pragmatic Constructive Realism in Philosophy and Theology, through a comparison with what I call transcendental pragmatism. Transcendental pragmatism explores the necessary conditions for pragmatic understanding as such. The paper shows that Chicka himself comes very close to transcendental pragmatism in his affirmation of pluralism that rejects exclusivism. In doing so, he is simply drawing out a necessary implication of pragmatic understanding as such; namely, a maximally inclusive community of inquiry. Having defended the method of transcendental pragmatism, I consider two metaphysical concepts that lead me to challenge Chicka’s rejection of panpsychism and agapism. At the same time, this inquiry aligns with Chicka’s effort to move beyond the impasse between ground of being and process theologies. The two concepts that I consider are process and God.