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RIP Nicholas Rescher, author of numerous works on the pragmatist tradition and pragmatist ideas has died aged 95. Members can find a short tribute by Forum member Ian McHugh in the virtual forum. Please feel free to share thoughts or memories about Rescher in the comments, if you interacted with him or his work.
Australasian Philosophical Review, Volume 6, Issue 1 (2022) is a special issue on Grace de Laguna, including a piece by Trevor Pearce on her critique of evolutionary pragmatism. Cheryl Misak has also recently published about de Laguna, arguing that it's an error to class her as a critic of pragmatism - that she is, in fact, part of our tradition.
CFP from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History - 2024 Annual Conference: Knowledge and Belief
Forum co-founder Anna Boncompagni has a new paper out in Hypatia "Hermeneutical Injustice and Bisexuality: Toward New Conceptual Tools". Here's the abstract:
The starting point of this paper is a clarification of the forms that hermeneutical injustice takes for bisexual individuals. While it is often thought that bisexuals do not need special protections or politics because they easily “pass” for straight and thus enjoy so-called hetero privilege, this precise situation is a source of oppression, silencing, erasure, and discrimination for many of them within both straight and gay environments. Bi-invisibility, bi-erasure, and persistent negative stereotypes contribute to specific forms of hermeneutical injustice for this segment of the population. Reflection on these forms, however, as well as reflection on bisexual identity, highlights some problematic aspects connected to the metaphor of hermeneutical “gaps” and the underlying theoretical model that are often used or assumed in research on epistemic injustice. With the aim of clarifying and responding to such difficulties, I introduce Wittgenstein's notion of hinges as a conceptual tool to better understand these phenomena. The case of bisexuality shows that seeing hermeneutical injustice in the light of the metaphor of hinges, instead of that of gaps, helps better grasp its features, its causes, and the forms that it can assume.
RIP Dan Dennett, whose relationship with pragmatism is more debatable (your thoughts welcome in the comments), but we might look first to Bjorn Ramberg's 1999 paper "Dennett's Pragmatism":
What shall we call a philosopher who on principle withdraws from ontological commitment, and who, waging a mixture of entertaiing fictions and scientific reportage, self-consciously and unapologietically engages in a rhetorical assault on common sensibilities? Many epithets have been applied. I shall use "pragmatist". (p. 63)
Dr. Scott Stroud's talk The Power of Ambedkar's Pragmatism from the Online Ambedkar Intellectual Summit 2024 is available on YouTube.
As ever, if we missed anything, please pop it in the comments!
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