Beyond realism and antirealism: John Dewey and the neopragmatists

Abstract

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?