History is in the midst of experiencing a "moral turn." This shift has resulted from the culture wars, challenges to objectivity and truth, and various world crises. Understanding moral issues through historical narratives requires a dialogue between historians and philosophers. Philosophers need to appreciate historians' attention to circumstance and context, while historians need to be familiar with philosophical concepts such as moral luck and virtue ethics. Rather than simply rendering judgments, history in a moral mode demonstrates the complexity behind agency, character, empathy, and moral decisions.
Jr., as formative influences.6 These popular philosophers, especially in their early work, drew from the thought of the pragmatic tradition. But pragmatism is not easily defined. H. S. Thayer effectively sums up pragmatism as "a theory of inquiry and judgment for which the logical characteristics and operations that issue in knowledge and in moral valuation and decision are integrally related." This definition plausibly captures the meaning and action continuum central to pragmatism. It misses, however, the cultural resonance of the pragmatist tradition in America. Here Richard Bernstein is more helpful by specifying anti-foundationalism, the fallible nature of truth, the social nature of the self, the importance of inquiry, and pluralism as the "constellation" of pragmatist ideas. From yet another angle pragmatism is a philosophical perspective closely intertwined with faith in science as an experimental method and open to revision in the light of the richness of experience. Dewey captured these imperatives with such terms as the "creative intelligence" and "warranted assertibility." The popular pragmatists worked within the outlines of these definitions of pragmatism and, in the process, helped to make pragmatism central to the conversation of American culture from the 1920s until the 1 940s.7 I Biographical information on these philosophers is in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, ed.
Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a “moral historian,” suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a “moral turn” currently afoot in the historical profession.
GEORGE GEORGE COTKIN COTKIN T T he he translation translation in in 1947 1947 of of Jean-Paul Jean-Paul Sartre's lecture, lecture, "Existentialism Sartre's "Existentialism is is a a Humanism" Humanism" (1945), (1945), insured insured that that the the term term existentialism existentialism would would enter enter into into the the vocabulary vocabulary of ofAmerican American thought thought and and culture. culture. Existentialism Existentialism is is notoriously notoriously difficult difficult to to define, define, especially especially since since it it claims claims a a varied varied philosophical philosophical background, background, drawing drawing from from
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