John J. Stuhr | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Born | John Jeremy Stuhr November 28, 1951 |
Alma mater | Carleton College (BA) Vanderbilt University (MA, PhD) |
Spouse | |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Pragmatism |
Main interests | Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics |
Notable ideas | Genealogical pragmatism |
John Jeremy Stuhr (born November 28, 1951) [1] is an American philosopher who teaches at Emory University. [2] He has written extensively about a wide assortment of philosophical figures and movements as well as a broad array of cultural problems and issues. [3] His work is known for its lively, engaged, and direct style. He draws critically on thinkers from often separated philosophical traditions (such as Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, and Deconstruction). Revealing his impatience with narrow and academic conceptions of philosophy, his writings make deep and consistent use of poetry, painting, photography, and the lyrics of contemporary music, and they exhibit a broad interdisciplinary reach across fields such as rhetoric, media studies, relativity theory, political and legal theory, cultural geography, and economics. [4]
Stuhr's mother was a philosophy professor who left the academy for politics and public service. His father, an aspiring poet, left the humanities and arts after World War II to become a founding partner in the country's first consulting firm to provide strategic planning for colleges and universities. He also served as Executive Director of the Economic Club of Chicago. [5] Growing up in the Chicago area and surrounded at home by philosophy and poetry and liberal politics, Stuhr attended New Trier High School. He then earned his B.A. in philosophy from Carleton College, studying with philosophers Roy Elveton, Gary Iseminger, Maury Landsman, and Perry Mason, classics scholar David H. Porter, and economist Robert E. Will. [6] Abandoning at the last moment his plans for law school, in less than three years he earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, where he studied with John J. Compton, Michael Hodges, Charles E. Scott, and Robert C. Williams. Under the direction of John Lachs, he wrote a dissertation, Experience as Activity: Dewey’s Metaphysics, focused on pragmatism and its historical roots in the thought of Aristotle and Hegel. [7]
Stuhr began his teaching career at the age of 24. After a year as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England, [8] he taught for a decade as assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor at Whitman College.[ citation needed ] He moved to the University of Oregon to become a professor of philosophy and the founding director of the Oregon Humanities Center. In 1994 he accepted appointment as head of the department of philosophy at Penn State University (and its more than 20 campuses) where he also was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies. [9] In 2003 he moved back to Vanderbilt University to become W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and American Studies. [10] In 2008, having chaired an external review of the department two years earlier, he accepted Emory University's offer to become Chair of the department of philosophy (2008–2016) and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies.
Throughout his university administrative work, Stuhr has evidenced strong commitment to philosophical pluralism and institutional diversity, a push for growth and an advocacy for philosophy and the humanities, and a determination to make strong faculty appointments and to provide the intellectual space for them to do high-quality work. [11] At Whitman College, for example, during Stuhr's leadership the philosophy department doubled in size and added the first women and first African-American philosophers in the institution's history. At the University of Oregon, the Humanities Center grew rapidly (fueled by major private fundraising) and engaged a highly diverse group of scholars on campus and intellectual leaders across the state. [12] During his headship at Penn State, the department hired a large group of philosophers including John Sallis (now at Boston College), John Russon (now at the University of Guelph), Richard A. Lee, Jr. (now at DePaul University), Shannon Sullivan (now at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Dennis J. Schmidt (now at Western Sydney University), and Nancy Tuana and Vincent Colapietro. [13] And, at Emory, under Stuhr's watch overhauls of both the undergraduate and graduate programs greatly increased diversity and pluralistic approaches to philosophy, as did appointments of new faculty including John T. Lysaker, Marta Jimenez, Melvin Rogers (now at Brown University), Susan M. Bredlau, Dilek Huseyinzadegan, and George Dewey Yancy. [14]
Stuhr has also held many lead administrative positions within the discipline of philosophy and, more broadly, the humanities. These include: president (1981), Northwest Philosophy Conference; director (1990–93), Western Humanities Conference; founding fellow (1987–2001), Society of Philosophers in America; president (2004–2006) and executive council (1982-1985, 2002–2008), Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; [15] vice-president and president elect (2023-24) and president (2024-24), Metaphysical Society of America; [16] and, founding director (2007--), American Philosophies Forum. [17] At present he is also the editor of the quarterly Journal of Speculative Philosophy (the oldest philosophy journal in the USA without religious affiliation) [18] and the founding American Philosophy book series general editor at Indiana University Press. [19]
Stuhr has held several visiting appointments and fellowships, including: a Fulbright Fellowship at Germany's Freiburg University (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg); a visiting faculty position at Australia's University of Melbourne; a visiting research fellowship at Saint Petersburg State University (Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, СПбГУ); and, three times, a visiting scholar position at Cornell University to complete book projects. In 2023, Carleton College presented Stuhr with a lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award. [20]
Stuhr has authored over 200 scholarly articles, book chapters, and editorials. He is also the author or editor of several books. His work has been supported by many other institutions, agencies, grants and awards, including: the American Philosophical Society, the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and Emory University's Institute for the History of Philosophy.
Stuhr has received several teaching awards. His graduate students and undergraduate students (more than two dozen of whom have received Ph.D.s in philosophy) include: professors and educators Rachel Dresbeck, Jeff Edmonds, Mark Fagiano, Tom Hilde, William S. Lewis, Michael Sullivan (now an Emory colleague), and Jamie Ross; business leaders and attorneys Sarah Bowers, Stephanie Dorgan, Wes Felix, Terrence R. McInnis, Brian Rabinovitz, Jibran Shermohammed, and Peter Viehl; and musicians and artists Marcus Amerman, C.J. Boyd, Chris Eckman, Charlie Humphrey, Max Levenson, Linda Lyons, and Deanne Meek. Through Dorgan (who owned Seattle's Crocodile Café), Stuhr met REM guitarist Peter Buck, and he, with members of REM and U2 singer Bono, served as character witnesses at Buck's “air rage” trial in London in 2002. [21] Stuhr also appeared in the National Public Television mini-series documentary, “A Parliament of Minds.” [22] In addition to his career in higher education, Stuhr also has worked as an editorial writer for the Portland Oregonian (under the direction of Robert M. Landauer) and as a political consultant on health and educational policy. [23]
The newest version of pragmatism included in American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, [24] Stuhr's genealogical pragmatism, a break from most traditional philosophy, draws on the work of 19th and 20th century American and European thinkers—particularly John Dewey's account of philosophy's “genetic method” and Foucault's genealogy—to develop a multiperspectival, fallible, always uncertain and unfinished, and irreducibly normative philosophy that is both critical and reconstructive in intent and effect. Stuhr argues that this philosophy is both instrumental—a criticism of the present on behalf of possibilities inherent in the present—and genealogical—a history of the present on behalf of future possibilities that are not inherent or imagined in the present. Stuhr stresses that this pragmatism does not even attempt to solve the problems of traditional philosophies: “Instead, studying both their ends and the means by which they have cloaked these ends in their self-proclaimed problems, methods, and systems, it localizes and abandons these philosophies.” [25] In this context, Stuhr examines the spread of a business or corporate approach to education and critical thought that marginalizes critical thought, develops a relational account of temporal experience and a relational, radical empiricist, relativistic account of values, and formulates a critical community politics that he applies to issues of economic inequality, higher education, and the disillusioned recognition of unreconstructed personal death. [26]
In a key chapter in Genealogical Pragmatism, “The Idols of the Twilight: Pragmatism and Postmodernism,” Stuhr shows how many pragmatists and many postmodernists are “children of Emerson” and, beginning with James and Nietzsche, he carefully charts their similarities and their differences. Stressing the reality of time and change, in Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy, Stuhr focuses on the ways in which these philosophical traditions present us with a Herculean labor to think and live differently in the future. [27] In particular, Stuhr suggests that the work of writers such as Deleuze, Adorno, and Foucault are crucial resources for pragmatist thinkers who find in earlier pragmatism “an account of inquiry insufficiently attuned to issues of power, struggle, and multiplicity; a radically democratic ideal in need of response to threats from new technologies and the defects of liberal governments and societies; a pluralism in tension with pragmatism’s understanding of its own values, methods, and future, and a view of philosophy as criticism that needs to become more critically self-reflective about its own history and effects, and about challenges to its very existence in possible post-critical societies.” [28] Stuhr's vision here is thoroughly democratic—he spells out a notion of democracy as a way of life (and one in the face of terrorism)—and thoroughly this-worldly—he concludes with “no consolation” by providing an account of ‘life without spirituality” and “philosophy without transcendence.”
In Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy, Stuhr characterized his genealogical pragmatism as a “critically pluralistic way of thinking” and “a way of living of great, ordinary love and sadness.” And he noted that philosophy is less a matter of argument and proof than of suggestion and evocation. These two themes—pluralism (across politics, morals, epistemologies, and ontologies) and philosophy as personal vision and creative, evocative art—are developed thoroughly in Pragmatic Fashions: Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism, and the Absurd. This book advances in part through a large number of paintings and the author's photographs and poems, suggests that different philosophies be understood as different and multiple personal visions of the world—just as we might see differences in the music of Beethoven and Beyoncé, the paintings of El Greco and Monet, or the writings of Jane Austen and James Baldwin. [29] Stuhr writes that this expressivist view of philosophy “is intimately attuned to key sensibilities of pragmatism—attuned to a deep fallibilism and experimentalism, pluralism and a thoroughgoing temporalism, a radically empirical relationalism or relativism, a commitment to methods of experimental intelligence and democratic practice, and an orientation to this world and the finitude of human life.” [30] Stuhr shows how this view illuminates philosophical disagreements in accounts of reality, knowledge, values, and political issues such as democracy, terrorism, and war. After setting forth an “absurd pragmatism” that draws as much or more on Camus than on James—Stuhr calls Sisyphysus “a pragmatist hero”--, [31] he sets forth a deeply personal, lyrical view of life that acknowledges both human finitude and human passion.
Stuhr also describes pragmatism as "a season of belief," a temporal philosophy. Given its melioristic core, he argues that pragmatism gives us a dynamic way by which we can improve our communities and personal lives a little bit more each day. [32]
Stuhr has two adult children and is married to Jessica T. Wahman, [1] a philosophy professor, the author of Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind, [33] and co-editor (with Stuhr and José M. Medina) of Cosmopolitanism and Place. [34]
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like difference, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
"Pragmaticism" is a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce for his pragmatic philosophy starting in 1905, in order to distance himself and it from pragmatism, the original name, which had been used in a manner he did not approve of in the "literary journals". Peirce in 1905 announced his coinage "pragmaticism", saying that it was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers". Today, outside of philosophy, "pragmatism" is often taken to refer to a compromise of aims or principles, even a ruthless search for mercenary advantage. Peirce gave other or more specific reasons for the distinction in a surviving draft letter that year and in later writings. Peirce's pragmatism, that is, pragmaticism, differed in Peirce's view from other pragmatisms by its commitments to the spirit of strict logic, the immutability of truth, the reality of infinity, and the difference between (1) actively willing to control thought, to doubt, to weigh reasons, and (2) willing not to exert the will, willing to believe. In his view his pragmatism is, strictly speaking, not itself a whole philosophy, but instead a general method for the clarification of ideas. He first publicly formulated his pragmatism as an aspect of scientific logic along with principles of statistics and modes of inference in his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series of articles in 1877-8.
John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.
Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.
Philip Stuart Kitcher is a British philosopher who is John Dewey Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University. He specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of literature, and more recently pragmatism.
Stephen P. Stich is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology. His 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in later years, as indicated in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind.
Richard McKeon was an American philosopher and longtime professor at the University of Chicago. His ideas formed the basis for the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
Joseph Zalman Margolis was an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he authored many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and elaborated a robust form of relativism.
John Lachs was a Hungarian-born American philosopher. He was Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, where he began teaching in 1967. Lachs received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1961. His primary focus was on American philosophy and German Idealism.
Richard Jacob Bernstein was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for Social Research, where he was Vera List Professor of Philosophy. Bernstein wrote extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics.
Robert B. Talisse is an American philosopher and political theorist. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is also a Professor of Political Science. Talisse is a former editor of the academic journal Public Affairs Quarterly, and a regular contributor to the blog 3 Quarks Daily, where he posts a monthly column with his frequent co-author and fellow Vanderbilt philosopher Scott Aikin. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001. His principal area of research is political philosophy, with an emphasis on democratic theory and liberalism.
Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.
Herman Wright Cappelen is a Norwegian philosopher. He is currently the Chair Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong.
Maria Baghramian is Full Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (UCD) and Professor II, at Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo (2023-2026). She was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 2010 and a member of Academia Europaea in 2021. Baghramian has published twelve authored and edited books as well as articles and book chapters on topics in epistemology and twentieth century American Philosophy. She was the Chief Editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS) from 2003 to 2013. She was the co-editor of Contemporary Pragmatism (2014–2022).
Sandra Brener Rosenthal is an American philosopher and former Provost Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans. She is a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America (1996).
Scott L. Pratt is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching is focused primarily upon American philosophy, especially in the areas of Native American philosophy, pragmatism, philosophy of race and gender, philosophy of education, and the history of logic. He has previously served in various administrative roles at the University of Oregon, including executive vice provost for academic affairs (2017–2019), dean of the graduate school (2015–2017), and associate dean for the humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences (2006–2009).