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SUBVERSIVE_PRAGMATIC

                                                 August 30, 2012

On the radical quality of Science,
and it's inspiration for pragmatism:

  From Scialabba's essay about
  Randolph Bourne, "The Promise     SCIALABBA
  of an American Life", p. 35
  (paragraphing, mine):

     "Bourne's cultural criticism was partly an attempt
     to apply the pragmatic instrumentalist philosophy of
     James and Dewey.  Today it may be hard to believe
     that pragmatism once seemed fresh, liberating,
     subversive; but it did. Philosophical pragmatism was
     the last, best blossom of Victorian agnosticism, the
     modest, tentative Yea that followed the Everlasting
     Nay.  It amounted to a cosmic wager on the adequacy
     of secular styles of thought and democratic forms of
     social life, a wager inspired and underwritten by
     the success of science."


     "In the experimental, antidogmattic, and-- not least
     important-- communal character of scientific practice,
     pragmatists beheld the image of a possible future."

                                          ANARCHIC_ROBINSON


        Scialabba goes on to discuss
        Bourne's take on Dewey: science
        as a "well ordered copy of the
        most fruitful habits of thought".




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