Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce's Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey (review)

naturalized epistemology. This was, for White, the philosophical proving ground of his claim that analysis should be applied to the full variety of human experience. But on the question of whether White has been able to articulate a truly “philosophical point of view”—one that transcends Quine’s “logical point of view” by demonstrating that an holistic pragmatism regarding beliefs holds across the manifold aspects of human understanding—it seems clear that White has been unable to offer a coherent perspective. Many of the studies in FFPV stand up well individually, but their common perspective is not obvious. Thus, for example, one of the major sections of the book is called “Analyticity, Morality, Causality, and Liberty”—topics that do not, despite the best efforts of the author, hang together very well. More revealing is the difference in outlook between the White of the 1950s and that of more recent times. His early pleas with analytic philosophers to address broad social issues, just as Mill and Dewey once had, have been replaced by what seems a forced, post hoc, attempt to claim that analytic philosophers had been practising the “philosophy of culture” all along. “[W]hile I was once disappointed by the failure of first-rate minds of the twentieth century to address problems of general concern,” White observes, tellingly, in his introduction to the volume, “I have since come to exult in the fact that Isaiah Berlin, Nelson Goodman, Herbert Hart, and John Rawls worked so beneficently in the philosophy of history, the philosophy of art, legal philosophy, and the philosophy of politics— that is to say, in the philosophy of culture” (p. 1). With the possible exception of Berlin, however, none of the philosophers whom White has come to exult has had much of an impact on public (as opposed to academic) debates regarding the major social or cultural issues of our time. They were dons and academicians rather than public moralists. One wonders if the young White, inspired by the example of Dewey, would have accepted that the philosophy of culture, as it now stands, is philosophy enough. Joel Isaac Selwyn College, University of Cambridge jti20@cam.ac.uk