Bart Schultz

The Land Acknowledgment of the Chicago History Museum provides another possible model for a University of Chicago LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT: "The Chicago History Museum is situated on ancestral homelands of the Potawatomi people, who cared for the land until forced out by non-Native settlers. The Ojibwe, Odawa, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Miami, Mascouten, Sac and Fox, Kickapoo, Ho-Chunk, Menomonee, and tribes whose names have been lost as a result of genocide also lived, gathered, and traded in this region. Today, Chicago is home to the largest urban Indigenous population in the Midwest, and they continue to honor this land and its waterways, practice traditions, and celebrate their heritage. The Chicago History Museum acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous communities and commits to an ongoing collaboration to share a complex and inclusive history.

University of Chicago
Senior Lecturer, Philosophy Department, Division of the Humanities; Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Work Address:
Philosophy Dept., Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago,  Edelstone Bldg. 133 (mail to Cobb MB# 103), 6030 S. Ellis Av., Chicago, Il. 60637
Phone: 773-571-0580 or 773-834-3929 ext. 1
E-Mail: rschultz@uchicago.edu or bartschultz63@gmail.com
Website: https://www.bartschultz.com/

I It is more or less de rigueur to begin a piece such as this by considering why anyone should take a serious philosphical interest in the ethics and politics of Bertrand Russell. Russell was, of course, one of the most profoundly influential philosophers of the twentieth ...

"A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze."-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass "And even at my age, and in these times, times that sometimes seem so bad, I can keep on keepin' on, and you can too."-Timuel D. Black, Sacred Ground Table of Contents Volume I.

Project Title College Course Feedback-Winter 2022 Number Enrolled 20 Number of Responses 12 Report CommentsOpinions expressed in these evaluations are those of students enrolled in the specific course and do not represent the University. Creation Date Monday, April 4, 2022 Download PDF What are the most important things that you learned in this course? Please reflect on the knowledge and skills you gained.

Henry Sidgwick was a Cambridge philosopher, psychic researcher and educational reformer, whose works in practical philosophy, especially The Methods of Ethics (1874), brought classical utilitarianism to its peak of theoretical sophistication and drew out the deep conflicts within that tradition, perhaps within the age of British imperialism itself. Sidgwick was profoundly influenced by J.S. Mill, but his version of utilitarianism – the view that those social or individual actions are right that maximize aggregate happiness – also revived certain Benthamite doctrines, though with more cogent accounts of ultimate good as pleasure, of total versus average utility, and of the analytical or deductive method. Yet Sidgwick was a cognitivist in ethics who sought both to ground utilitarianism on fundamental intuitions and to encompass within it the principles of common-sense ethics (truthfulness, fidelity, justice, etc.); his highly eclectic practical philosophy assimilated much of the ratio...

... Henry Sidgwick, Essays on Ethics and Method Reviewed by. Bart Schultz. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. Philosophy in Review ISSN 1206-5269 EISSN 1920-8936. ...

Henry Sidgwick shared many of the feminist concerns of John Stuart Mill and was an active reformer in the cause of higher education for women, but his feminism has never received the attention it deserves and he has in recent times been criticized for promulgating a masculinist epistemology. This essay is a prolegomenon to a comprehensive account of Sidgwick's feminism, briefly setting out various elements of his views on epistemology, equality, gender, and sexuality in order to provide some initial sense of how he carried on and developed the Millian project.

Henry Sidgwick has gone down in the history of philosophy as both the great, classical utilitarian moral theorist who authoredThe Methods of Ethics, and an outstanding exemplar of intellectual honesty and integrity, one whose personal virtues were inseparable from his philosophical strengths and method. Yet this construction of Sidgwick the philosopher has been based on a too limited understanding of Sidgwick's casuistry and leading practical ethical concerns. As his friendship with John Addington Symonds reveals, Sidgwick was deeply entangled in an effort to negotiate the proper spheres of the public and private, not only in philosophical and religious matters, but also with respect to explosive questions of sexuality – particularly same sex actions and identities, as celebrated by Symonds and other champions of Oxford Hellenism and Whitmania. His willingness to mislead the public about such issues suggests that Sidgwick's utilitarian casuistry was rather more complex and e...

J. B. Schneewind's Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy was the single best philosophical commentary on Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics produced in the twentieth century. Although Schneewind was primarily concerned to read Sidgwick's ethical theory in its historical context, as reflecting the controversies generated by such figures as J. S. Mill, F. D. Maurice, and William Whewell, his reading also ended up being highly neo-Kantian, reflecting various Rawlsian priorities. As valuable as such an interpretation of Sidgwick surely is, Schneewind's approach has always been in some key respects too narrowly conceived in its construction of Sidgwick's philosophical and cultural context, failing to grapple with such troubling, philosophically relevant issues as the possible racism of Sidgwick's ethical and political views, or the sexual politics manifest in his collaboration with such figures as John Addington Symonds.

and inefficient norms” (179). She claims that “individuals systematically underestimate the similarity of their attitudes to those of their peers” (184). For instance, I might not like prejudicial treatment of immigrants, but I might engage in prejudicial behavior because others appear to approve of it. Little do I know that many others share my disapproval (187). The result is that the norm goes unchallenged. So, “individuals may disapprove of the norm but still refrain from open dissension because they interpret others’ behavior as signaling support” (195). Bicchieri closes the book with the suggestion that we can understand how a fairness norm might emerge in the absence of one by recognizing that “most individuals who behave in a ‘fair’ or ‘decent’ way do so simply because they have certain kinds of expectations” (217). In general, social norms emerge because, in unfamiliar situations where it is expected that there is a norm, actors look for behavioral regularities and, having identified them, they aim to conform to them when they expect that doing so is preferred by a sufficient part of the population. Here Bicchieri stands opposed to a tendency to leave unstated the psychological aspects of norm-following (217). For a philosophical audience, Grammar may be somewhat unsatisfying, not because it works within a certain philosophical outlook about social norms but because it avoids engagement with philosophical issues in favor of working out the empirical details of that outlook. (A glance at Bicchieri’s bibliography is some indication of her intended domain of engagement.) Yet Grammar is nonetheless interesting for its focused attempt to articulate how one conception of social norms can be made experimentally respectable. Sadly, many philosophers eschew such tasks. But if they want social norms in their analyses of any number of phenomena, they ultimately need an empirically respectable story about how social norms actually affect behavior. Bicchieri should be praised for pursuing this kind of investigation.

“If we were to follow the wisdom of repugnance in eating, the greatest wisdom would undoubtedly be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived for a year on cottage cheese and rye bread; my old friend Bart Schultz, who ate cheese pizza and salad; or nearly any two-year old” (81–82). I was delighted to thus discover myself—neatly sandwiched between philosophical genius and wonderful, stubborn innocence—close to the heart of Anne Norton’s timely, insightful, and very personal account of the thinking and politicizing of Leo Strauss and his followers, many of whom have achieved prominence in the neoconservative movement of recent decades. Over the course of thirteen chapters, bearing such titles as “Closing the American Mind” and “Getting the Natural Right,” her book both explicates the core meaning of the term “Straussian” and brings vividly to life—often in high comic relief—the strange sociology of this school of thought. Her account can be especially recommended to European political philosophers, who have often found themselves baffled by the phenomenon of Straussianism, if they have heard of it at all. The above line comes in the midst of a witty attack on the views of Leon Kass, chairman of the Presidential Council on Bioethics and an ardent Straussian who has, in Norton’s words, undertaken “to tell Americans not only how they ought to eat but how they ought to think of romance, marry, and produce children, how happiness should be earned, and how they should mourn” (79). Her judgment is stern:

I It is more or less de rigueur to begin a piece such as this by considering why anyone should take a serious philosphical interest in the ethics and politics of Bertrand Russell. Russell was, of course, one of the most profoundly influential philosophers of the twentieth ...

Course evaluations for the Zoom version of Happiness, spring quarter 2021.  The course focused mainly on Haybron's emotional condition theory of happiness and authenticity requirement for well-being, and Sumner's authentic  happiness (as life satisfaction) theory of well-being, though much critical material was introduced to underscore the ideological dimensions of happiness research and the need for greater diversity and inclusion.

These are the course evaluations from the 2019 version of my advanced undergraduate seminar on consequentialism.  For this version of the course, key works included Eggleston and Miller, The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism, and de Lazari-Radek and Singer, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.

Course evaluations from my winter 2019 course on Philosophy and Philanthropy.  The course was designedly experimental and structured to be responsive to student participation (all students participated in group presentations on topics of special interest to them).  The readings featured various philosophical perspectives on effective altruism and highlighted important contemporary critiques of mainstream philanthropy.

A book review of a superb recent volume devoted to the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Available at Utilitas, FirstView, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/tommie-shelby-and-brandon-m-terry-eds-to-shape-a-new-world-essays-on-the-political-philosophy-of-martin-luther-king-jr-cambridge-ma-the-belknap-press-of-harvard-university-press-2018-pp-464-3500/B9D68AFAC02E159F0FB226D47A9694F0

Some critical reflections on the forms of political nostalgia, the responsibilities of academic philosophers, and the continuing need for a more diverse and inclusive approach to philosophy and its history, with special reference to Timuel Black's memoir Sacred Ground.  See http://jptp.online/issues/volume-ii/

On December 8, 2018, an All-Star cast gathered at the Logan Center Performance Hall to participate in a symposium on the life and times of the remarkable Prof. Timuel D. Black, educator, civil rights activist, oral historian, and the Senior Statesman of Chicago's mid-South Side.  Prof. Black had just turned 100 years old on December 7, and the performances and panels that made up this birthday symposium formed a remarkable tribute to his life and work.  Prof. Black's new memoir, Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black, has just been released by Northwestern University Press.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0E-gGiJ6M&fbclid=IwAR1kPF_5Nf3tH6mwfnkeB0k7kvX4hWb6-lzhPjNALdqz2tD5LazrpIexwV0

A brief critical reflection on the reception of my books The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians (Princeton, 2017) and Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004). The clarifications and rejoinders offered are, I believe, important for understanding how these works reflect both a sympathetic, complex reconstruction of the classical utilitarian legacy and an approach to the history of philosophy prioritizing diversity and inclusion.
http://www2.units.it/etica/2018_2/SCHULTZ.pdf

William Godwin: rebel for love, happiness, and anarchy

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    Sunday 4 June 2017 5:30PM

What does happiness have to do with morality? Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are perhaps the most recognised ‘happiness philosophers’. They gave us the moral rule we more-or-less live by today: seek the greatest good for the greatest number. But one of their number—William Godwin—often drops off the list. His views on free love, anarchy, and government stretched the doctrine about as far as it could go—and so did his love life. To this day his thinking challenges us to consider what it means to live well.

Bart Schultz on The Happiness Philosophers
May 30, 2017 by PUP Author

SchultzIn The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most profoundly influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” utilitarianism was developed by the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin (the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Schultz recently took the time to answer some questions about his new book.

What do you hope to achieve with this book?

Well, I suppose it represents one of the ways in which I try to “do good better,” as the saying goes.  Among other things, I would like to see it help spark a more critical approach to the so-called “happiness industry,” that vast literature (both popular and academic) on the subject of happiness that far too often lends itself to questionable political (or apolitical) agendas.  The great nineteenth-century utilitarians—Godwin and Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick—developed and deployed their notions of happiness as part of their tireless efforts to advance social reform, e.g. seeking to promote happiness by securing political and social equality for women.  They had their failings, but their energetic reformism was often admirable and their example remains relevant to our political situation today.  Were they around today, they would all be participating in the Women’s Marches, fighting global poverty, and sounding the alarm about global warming.

Many people might not think of utilitarianism in that way, or of academic philosophy as holding that potential.

Yes, but those are views that I am out to challenge.  I hope that my book will inspire people in many different walks of life, academic or not, both to revisit the classical utilitarians and to engage with the wonderful utilitarian philosophizing at work in the world today, as evidenced by the journal Utilitas.  Curiously, although there is a laudable and widespread interest in the work of Peter Singer, particularly the animal liberation and effective altruism movements that he did so much to advance, that interest often fails to extend to the philosophical roots of his utilitarian perspective in the work of Henry Sidgwick, the greatest of the nineteenth century utilitarians.  But if the philosophizing and activism of Singer can so engage people, the work of Sidgwick and the other great utilitarians should be able to inspire them as well.  True, the old, malicious caricatures of the classical utilitarians are still far too common.  In my own experience teaching at the University of Chicago for thirty years, even many of the brightest young students of philosophy harbor views of classical utilitarianism that owe more to the hostile depictions of it by critics than to the classical utilitarian writings themselves.  They have read Michel Foucault on Bentham, but not Bentham; John Rawls on Sidgwick, but not Sidgwick, and so on.

How will your book change that?

By providing fuller portraits of the lives and works of the classical utilitarians taken together.  The philosophizing and the activist life of, say, William Godwin (but the others as well) were genuinely inseparable, and one gets a much better sense of what his philosophy actually meant by looking at how it was realized in his life—for example, in his relationships with the amazing Mary Wollstonecraft and the daughter they had, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.  When students meet classical utilitarianism only through one or another stylized argument (often not one that was actually made by the great utilitarians), as in the popular “Trolley cases,” they do not gain a good sense of the resources of the utilitarian perspective, of its potential as a change agent.  Thus, much of what people today champion as a many-sided liberal education—the kind of education that Martha Nussbaum has done so much to articulate and defend—was in fact defended by such figures as Mill and Sidgwick, on utilitarian grounds.  They loved and promoted the humanities, and often criticized the universities for failing to support philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as for failing to open up educational opportunities for all.  On these topics and others, we still have much to learn from them.

What is your biggest worry or regret about your book?

Naturally, I wish that I could have spent another ten years on it—there is still so much research to do, especially on Bentham.  Also, it breaks my heart that Derek Parfit, who died on January 1st, will not around to read the final published version.  He read various drafts, especially of the chapter on Sidgwick, and was very, very supportive and helpful, as he always has been.  My first major publication was an article contributed to the 1986 Ethics symposium on Reasons and Persons, an article to which he wrote a Reply, and I think that from that time to this I have never published anything without wondering what he would think of it—and fortunately, very often finding out, since he was so generous in his comments.  Some of my more recent work was devoted to On What Matters.  And I was profoundly honored to include him in the book symposium that I edited on Kasia de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s recent book, The Point of View of the Universe.  Readers familiar with Derek’s work will see how parts of my Sidgwick chapter, relating to personal identity and other issues, are addressed to some of the points that he made about Sidgwick.  I once remarked to him that I thought his work was ultimately more about reasons, and mine more about persons, in the full biographical sense.  But really, he was the one who, with J. B. Schneewind, gave me the confidence and courage to pursue my Sidgwick studies, which in turn led to this book.  I am glad to have this opportunity to explain just how much I owe to both of them.

Bart Schultz is senior lecturer in the humanities and director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians.
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Filed Under: Author Interviews, Philosophy Tagged With: Happiness, Henry Sidgwick, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Philosophy, utilitarianism

Sidgwick. By exploring the fascinating historical contexts and human sides of these remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, it yields a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives. By resisting overly reductive or narrow accounts of the meaning of utilitarianism, this historical reconstruction can also help explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems. See

Endorsements:

"The Happiness Philosophers is a remarkable achievement. Bart Schultz uses his skill in philosophical biography to bring the founders of utilitarianism to life. But he does much more than that. By revealing the early utilitarians' fascinating mix of intelligence, passion, and reforming zeal, he dispels caricatures of utilitarian thinking. His conviction that utilitarianism can guide us in our search for solutions to the ethical and political problems we face today only adds to the importance of the book."—Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

"In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the gripping story of the founders of utilitarianism. Far from being prosaic materialists dedicated to calculating pleasure and pain, the utilitarians were passionate humanists and reformers whose ideas offer crucial insights about inequality and suffering. They were fascinating individuals, brilliant and eccentric, creative and surprising, and their lives are as important to study as their writings. A wonderful achievement."--Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

"Utilitarianism has been a central ethical position in Western philosophy for more than two centuries, yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the lives of its major proponents. This is especially remarkable given how unusual and fascinating those lives were. Bart Schultz has found a marvelous topic, and he writes beautifully, seamlessly connecting the lives and ideas of these thinkers."—Roger Crisp, University of Oxford

"The Happiness Philosophers is a beautifully conceived and brilliantly executed book. Its focus on the founders of utilitarianism is a masterstroke, and it provides wonderful details about their lives."--Brad Hooker, University of Reading

This event took place on May 2, 2016, at the Rebuild Foundation's Stony Island Arts Bank, and it featured Prof. Timuel D. Black and friends, including Chicago artist Prof. Theaster Gates and Prof. Jacqueline Stewart.  It was sponsored by the UChicago Civic Knowledge Project, in collaboration with the Rebuild Foundation.  See https://youtu.be/UuSDUNAkFL8

The 2017 Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization conference will be hosted by the CKP's Winning Words Philosophy Program at the University of Chicago on June 23 and 24 of 2017.  Students and educators at all levels are welcome to attend.  The conference will speak to both those with a developed interest in precollege philosophy and those seeking to get involved in such efforts.  If appropriate, please consider proposing a paper or presentation.  More details are available on the PLATO website, at http://www.plato-philosophy.org/plato-conferences/

This short article further develops a theme that I have addressed in such previous works as "Pragmatist in Chief" and "Obama's Political Philosophy"--namely, how President Obama's rhetorical devices fit or do not fit with his policies during his time in the Oval Office.  The philosophical pragmatism that has often shaped his public speeches might well suggest that he ought to be more fully supportive of such protest movements as Black Lives Matter, instead of positioning himself in the way that he has.

Available for free at https://roundedglobe.com/html/34a3e7ff-778f-48d5-bca0-ed4e10132715/en/A%20More%20Reasonable%20Ghost:%20Further%20Reflections%20on%20Henry%20Sidgwick%20and%20the%20Irrationality%20of%20the%20Universe/

Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) has often been cast as the most philosophically astute of the classical utilitarians and as an epistemological foundationalist who defended a non-metaphysical form of cognitive intuitionism and, in general, set a new standard for academic philosophical ethics. Such perspectives, increasingly prominent since the revival of interest in Sidgwick in the 1970s, do capture important elements of his philosophy. But they do not fully capture Sidgwick’s reflexive, agnostic notion of reasonableness, the concerns he shared with his Idealist opponents, and his larger existential anxieties about the irrationality of the cosmos and the meaning of modernity.

This essay presents and further develops claims first made in my keynote address delivered to the conference on “Transcendence, Idealism, and Modernity” held at New College, Oxford in 2011. It sets out, in light of those themes, a number of difficulties for the standard interpretations of and philosophical engagements with the philosophy of Sidgwick.

Full ebook available at  https://roundedglobe.com/html/3fa819cb-df93-4e3b-bab7-cf2e7d4f8a08/en/The%20New%20Chicago%20School%20of%20Philosophy/

The original 'Chicago School of Philosophy' was the version of philosophical pragmatism promoted primarily by John Dewey after he moved to the University of Chicago in 1894. Dewey's views, emphasizing anti-foundationalism, participatory democratic community, and educational reform to advance democratic citizenship, led to both the foundation of the University of Chicago Laboratory School and a critique of the elitist tendencies of the University of Chicago under its first president, William Rainey Harper.

The pragmatist revival that began in the 1970s and 80s with the work of such philosophers as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam compellingly revisited and reconstructed many aspects of Deweyan pragmatism; but it largely failed to revisit and reconstruct anything like Dewey's critique of institutions of higher education, despite the ever increasing relevance of that critique to the structure of higher education in North America.

Schultz's essay draws on the work of the University of Chicago Civic Knowledge Project, which has worked to reconstruct the Deweyan legacy to provide a better model of 'civic engagement' than those informing the educational policies of today - establishing, in effect, a 'New Chicago School of Philosophy'.

Thomas Hurka's new book provides a very serious and detailed defence of a view that he has been carefully nurturing for some years—namely, that what deserves to be called a ‘distinctive school in the history of moral philosophy’ is reflected in the works of Henry Sidgwick, Hastings Rashdall, J.M.E. McTaggart, H.S. Prichard, G.E. Moore, E.F. Carritt, W.D. Ross, C.D. Broad, and A.C. Ewing [1–2]. Beyond their marked penchant for going by first initials, these Oxbridge philosophers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were united, according to Hurka, by some very compelling ideas [1]:
"They were all non-naturalists, believing moral judgements can be objectively true rather than, say, just expressing emotions, and have a distinctive subject matter, so they are neither reducible to nor derivable from ones about natural science, theology, or metaphysics; no ‘ought’ follows from an ‘is’. They were also intuitionists, believing we can know the moral truth by direct insight or intuition, either about principles or about particular cases … They agree about which are the fundamental concepts for moral thought and which should be set aside or treated as derivative. They also shared, to differing degrees, a commitment to theorizing morality. They believed that whenever a particular moral judgement is true there is a general principle that makes it true, and a central task of normative ethics is to identify the ultimate such principles."

This rough draft has now been superseded by the final and much expanded version, "A More Reasonable Ghost: Further Reflections on Henry Sidgwick and the Irrationality of the Universe."  Please consult that version, available at http://roundedglobe.com/book/552f535b19f933f421b5e854/A%20More%20Reasonable%20Ghost:%20Further%20Reflections%20on%20Henry%20Sidgwick%20and%20the%20Irrationality%20of%20the%20Universe

Derek Parfit’s long-awaited work On What Matters is a very ambitious, very
strange production seeking to defend both a nonreductive and nonnaturalistic
but nonmetaphysical and nonontological form of cognitive intuitionism
or rationalism and an ethical theory (the Triple Theory) reflecting the
convergence of Kantian universalizability, Scanlonian contractualism, and
rule utilitarianism. Critics have already countered that Parfit’s metaethics is
unbelievable and his convergence thesis unconvincing, but On What Matters
is a truly Sidgwickian work, the implications of which largely remain to be
worked out. Parfit does not go far enough in spelling out exactly what matters
and why, what normative reasons we actually have, and where we should
go from here, if we take him seriously.

Abstract:
Although U.S. President Barack Obama has often sounded the rhetorical notes of a certain type of philosophical pragmatism, his actual policies during his presidency have to date failed to address in adequate fashion the structural inequalities that seriously compromise the American democratic potential. Thus, from the perspective of a Deweyan democratic pragmatism, which could readily side with Occupy Wall Street and related movements, the Obama presidency has yet to prove that it is truly committed to fostering the social intelligence that only a more participatory and deliberative form of democracy could realize.

“Pragmatist-in-Chief: Further Reflections on the Philosophical Pragmatism of Barack Obama.”  Invited paper presented to a Plenary Session of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, University of North Carolina—Charlotte, March 11, 2010.  In “Symposium: Obama and Pragmatism,” eds. Mark Sanders and Colin Koopman, Contemporary Pragmatism, Vol. 8, No. 2, December 2011, pp. 7-15.  Available online at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/rodopi/cpm/2011/00000008/00000002/art00002

Document Type: Research article

Henry Sidgwick is one of the great intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Britain. He was first and foremost a great moral philosopher, whose masterwork, The Mrthods of Ethics, is still widely studied today. But he was many other things hesides, writing on religion, economics, ...

A common objection to utilitarianism is that maximizing the total or the average net happiness fails to take sufficient account of the separateness of persons.' In one guise, this is of course the Rawlsian complaint against utilitarianism. Rawls claims that the utilitarian approach ...

In early work, I argued that Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, often represented, in his political speeches and writings, a form of philosophical pragmatism with special relations to the University of Chicago and its reform tradition. That form of pragmatism, ...

Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction I Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis 2 Jeremy Bentham on Slavery and the Slave Trade 33 Frederick Rosen 3 Jeremy Bentham: Legislator of the World? 57 Jennifer Pitts 4 James Mill's The History of British India. The Question of ...

The pragmatist revival of recent decades has in some respects obscured the radi-cal emancipatory potential of Deweyan pragmatism. The author suggests that neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty have too often failed to grasp the ways in which Dewey's notion of social ...

... http://pos.sagepub.com/content/29/1/89 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/004839319902900104 1999 29: 89 Philosophy of the Social Sciences Bart Schultz Larmore and Rawls ... Larmore and Rawls BART SCHULTZ University of Chicago ...