Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Pragmatic pretzling

On this gloriously sunny late-September afternoon, when I'd much rather be outside walking in the briskly warm air, I'm instead hunkered over my desk and laptop, trying to suss out the concepts, logic, objections, refutations and adaptations of the philosophy known as Pragmatism. My poor brain just doesn't fire as fast as it used to, so it's taking a while to get pretzel it around these concepts.

I'm doing this by reading an expert of a book written by Hans Joas (1996) called The Creativity of Action, in which he conceptualizes action according to Pierce's pragmatic approach and G.H. Mead's approach to the integration of mind and self, in both the individual and social sense of the terms.

I do wish that the excerpt provided more meat about his take on Mead. I just finished re-reading swatches of Mead's Mind, Self & Society for my Contemporary Social Theory course and the professor seems rather enamoured of the whole school of pragmatism. So I'm sure Friday's class will be another exercise in pretzling my brain around new theories and takes that aren't quite in line with what I thought I read.

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