Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

The essays collected in this volume and authored by Sami Pihlström emphasize that our relation to the world we live in and seek to represent and get to know better through our practices of conceptualization and inquiry is irreducibly valuational. There is no way of even approaching, let alone resolving, the philosophical issue of realism without drawing due attention to the ways in which human values are inextricably entangled with even the most purely “factual” projects of inquiry we engage in.

This entanglement of the factual and the normative is, as explicitly argued in Chapter 7 but implicitly suggested in all the other chapters as well, both pragmatic (practice-embedded and practice-involving) and transcendental (operating at the level of the necessary conditions for the possibility of our representing and cognizing the world in general). The author claims we need to carefully examine the complex relations of realism, value, and transcendental arguments at the intersection of pragmatism and analytic philosophy. This book does so by offering case-studies of various important neopragmatists and philosophers close to the pragmatist tradition, including Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Joseph Margolis, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It appeals to scholars and advanced graduate students focusing on pragmatism and analytic philosophy.

Sami Pihlström (PhD from the University of Helsinki in 1996) is, since 2014, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has previously served as, among other things, Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä (2006-2014), the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2009-2015), and the Chair (2019-2021) and Vice-Chair (2016-2018) of the Research Council for Culture and Society at the Academy of Finland. He is the President of the Philosophical Society of Finland (since 2016) and of the William James Society (2023-2024), and a Vice-President of Institut International de Philosophie (I.I.P., since 2022). He is also one of the founders of the Nordic Pragmatism Network and the European Pragmatism Association. Since the 1990s, he has published actively on pragmatism, realism, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and the philosophy of religion. His recent books include Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy: On Viewing the World by Acknowledging the Other (Helsinki University Press, 2020), Why Solipsism Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020), Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age: Sincerity, Normativity, and Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities (SUNY Press, 2022), and Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2023). He is an invited lifetime member of Academia Europaea, I.I.P., the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.