Abstract

As Tara Mastrelli, Richard J. Bernstein’s teaching assistant for his American Pragmatism seminar, tells the story of his final months, he was teaching his course on American Pragmatism at the New School for the last time while imagining an essay on “Pragmatism Reconsidered,” that he ran out of time to write. In this unwritten essay, Mastrelli reports, Bernstein planned to call for three mid-course shifts in contemporary pragmatists’ understanding of our past, present, and future that would steer us away from essentializing the characteristics of our diverse river of thinking, away from canonizing a short list of founders that excludes the diverse college-educated women and Black men who helped to launch the... Read More.