Jeffrey Stout

Must the participant to public discourse have knowledge of her beliefs, attitudes and reasons as well as belief-formation processes to have justified political belief? In this paper, we test this question with reference to Jeffrey Stout's (2004) approach to public discourse and public philosophy. After defining self-knowledge and justification along the lines of James Pryor (2004), we map thereon Stout's view of public discourse and public philosophy as democratic piety, earnest storytelling and Brandomian expressive rationality. We then lay out Brian Leiter's (2016) naturalistic critique of public philosophy as " discursive hygiene " to see whether Stoutian public philosophy survives the former's emotivist-tribalist gauntlet. Lastly, we find that Leiter's critique proves less radical than it may appear and requires the moderating influence of a public philosophy like Stout's. All in all, Stoutian public discourse and public philosophy powerfully illustrates a strong, necessary connection between self-knowledge and political justification. Post-truth is not post-justification.

This paper compares the way two philosophers, John Rawls and Jeffrey Stout, imagine the proper role of religious thought in democracies. It applies their ideas to the case of Islamic advocacy of political policies in modern Muslim society. It argues that the use of religious language in political advocacy does not by itself undermine democratic deliberation.

The article argues that frequently-voiced critiques of Rawls’s political liberalism have been misguided, because the ignore the extent to which Rawls takes his inspiration from a particular historical experience, namely that of the USA. The article suggests that a better model to accommodate the European historical experience would be a ‘symbolic’ presence of religion in public political argument: In a situation of world-view pluralism, politicians are well advised to show how the values and coercive laws they promote can be derived from within one or a number of) particular religious traditions. Such attempts will be particularly valuable where they are symbolic, in the sense that they are undertaken  by politicians who do not themselves belong to the religious tradition(s) in question.

If considerable scholarly attention has focused on the content permitted in Jeffrey Stout's (2004) pragmatist-expressivist account of political discourse and justification as reason-giving, less has been said on the scope and scale thereof. Can time-consuming and intensely individual reason-giving shape institutional and societal discourse in the same way as it does face-to-face encounters, associational life and broad-based organizing? While one might grant that unconstrained discourse and appeal to an individual standpoint are appropriate to building consensus and legitimacy in the latter instances, one may yet harbour doubts whether public officials could engage in earnest personal narration and exchange of individual perspectives. Indeed, Stout (2004) does much to encourage such doubts by "not addressing the distinctive issues surrounding the roles of judge, juror, attorney, or public official" bound by public reason (315). Likewise, Stout's own questions as to the efficacy of grassroots groups and broad-based organizing at the state, national or international level may give the impression that there exists a scaling-up problem between the individual or associational and the institutional. In this paper, we sketch a Stoutian answer to the problems of scope and scale through resources present in Stout (2004) and (2010a). As concerns scope, we ask whether certain structural conditions present in the individual and associational context-most notably, potential for default-and-challenge interactions-find a parallel in the institutional settings of constitutional democracies and thereby displace more familiar liberal public reason. Regarding scale, we question whether broad-based citizens' organizations might bridge the institutional gap and make a net-positive contribution to the overall deliberative system by transposing Stout (2010a) into the deliberative systems literature. If the questions of scope and scale do not admit of an unqualified yes or no, this suggests that, while potentially of broader application than he envisions, Stout's account of political discourse cannot be implemented equally at all institutional and systemic levels.

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the “body politics” of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as “constantinian” entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as “racelessness,” by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopo- litical alternative to the nation–state’s politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of “nonviolent violence.” Thus, Hauerwas must do something that he has been reluctant to do. He must talk about race and racism more directly, specifying how his ecclesiological theopolitics resists such forms of violence; more impor- tantly, he must demonstrate how actual ecclesial congregations instan- tiate such resistance. In short, to be truly nonviolent, Hauerwas’s body politics must become a politics of bodies.

What role should religion play in public discourse? Not too long ago, Richard Rorty argued, in more than one place, that religion is a "conversation stopper" which polite people refer to only in private conversations.2 Religious believers complain, however, that this practice renders it impossible for them to participate in public discourse. They ask whether a democratic community is worthy of the name if it effectively forbids (by custom or legislation) a significant segment of its citizens from acknowledging and drawing upon their own traditions to help justify their moral and political claims? In Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argued that democratic communities are established by cultivating the habit.

What role should religion play in public discourse? Not too long ago, Richard Rorty argued, in more than one place, that religion is a "conversation stopper" which polite people refer to only in private conversations.2 Religious believers complain, however, that this prac tice renders it impossible for them to participate in public discourse. They ask whether a democratic community is worthy of the name if it effectively forbids (by custom or legislation) a significant segment of its citizens from acknowledging and drawing upon their own traditions to help justify their moral and political claims?3 In Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argued that democratic communi ties are established by cultivating the habit of "holding one another respon sible" in public discourse.4 By highlighting habit in this way, Stout is picking up on and developing Dewey's conviction that all of our moral sensibilities, including those that make possible democratic discourse, ar...

This article retraces the “genealogy” of the fideist perspective in philosophy as well as literature, especially within the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and the novel Don Quixote. It contends that a demythologized perspective of the fideist-humanist sort, based upon Erasmian tolerance and intellectual creativity and updated with the insights of post-analytic theory (e.g., the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, and Jeffrey Stout), without revoking the vocabulary of transcendence, can reinforce the weathered but still valuable post-Enlightenment moral vocabulary, and can reiterate the humaneness of liberal hope without undue encumbrance from the dogmatic baggage of traditional theological jargon and metaphysics.

Page 1. Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 3, No. 1 (June 2006), 85–104 © 2006 Stout's Democracy without Secularism: But is it a Tradition? Ronald A. Kuipers This article critiques Jeffrey Stout's suggestion in ...

This paper appears here by special permission from George Leaman at the Philosophy Documentation Center.The issue of this paper is the extent to which historicism excludes metaphysics in the contemporary revival of American philosophical pragmatism. Minimalist metaphysical assumptions are implied in philosophical neo-pragmatism, and so the author develops the dialectical position of religious neo-pragmatism, which is the unity of what is true in both theological and philosophical neo-pragmatism.