Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism: Democratic Deliberation, Humanist Controversies, and Purposeful Mediation

For over a century Euro-American pragmatism has developed as a philosophical movement that takes seriously the human significance of language. Indeed, one might characterize much pragmatist thought as specifically being preoccupied with rhetoric, the use of language in a context to have effects. Inside the academy this rhetorical pragmatism often registers as a language-centered form of humanistic antifoundationalism that refuses absolute distinctions between subject and object, meaning and significance, fact and value, knowledge and opinion, aesthetics and politics. In various non-academic public spheres, one version of this pragmatism supports a progressive pluralism and an inclusive deliberative democracy. In the following remarks, I would like to explore this tradition of Euro-American rhetorical pragmatism and one of its prominent features: a rhetoric of purposeful mediation.