Ricerc@Sapienza

Kant and ‘Pragmatic’ Schematism. The «Material Idea» Between Plato and Aristotle · Kant’s philosophy is often animated by the aim of conciliating opposite positions. With regard to the opposition between the two classical options of the history of metaphysics, namely Platonism and Aristotelism, he discusses the problem of the so-called « idea materialis » as a possible ‘bridge’ between material reality and immaterial knowledge. Kant ascribes the invention of « material ideas » to Descartes, but no occurrance of this expression can be found in the writings of the French thinker.

Recensione di “P. Olen and C. Sachs, Pragmatism in Transition: Contemporary Perspectives on C.I. Lewis (Palgrave Macmillan 2017)”

In the chapter, I survey the contemporary pragmatist landscape in the light of its commitment to the centrality of the notion and category of conduct.

References to moral exemplars run deep into the history of philosophy, as we find them featured in rather disparate context and approaches which span from virtue ethics to moral perfectionism, from existentialism to moral particularism. In the varied and growing contemporary literature on moral exemplarism, we find a number of options that can be brought down to the two rather broad yet distinctive categories of theoretical and anti-theoretical approaches.

James’s ethics is among the most intricate facets of his work. It thus hardly comes as a surprise that scholars, both inside and outside pragmatism, have been disagreeing not only over the details of James’s moral philosophy but also over its most general shape. Not only, in fact, there have been several contrasting accounts of his writings and their overall coherence – or lack thereof –, but also conflicting narratives of their very scope and goals.

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe: Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. The history of twentiethcentury philosophy is often written as an account of the development of one or both