To honor the work of Richard J. Bernstein, a group of colleagues and former students will gather at Stony Brook University for a conference entitled, Thinking the Plural: Richard J. Bernstein’s Contribution to American Philosophy.
The papers from this conference are also being collected for a volume of the same name, edited by former students Marcia Morgan and Jonathan Pickle.
My contribution has the working title: The Ethics of Philosophy in a Digital Age: Peirce, Dewey, Bernstein and the Cultivation of Creative Digital Democracies. Drawing on Bernstein’s account of the ethos of pragmatism in his 1988 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, “Pragmatism, Pluralism and the Healing of Wounds,” the essay advocates for practices of digital communicative transaction rooted in the habits of an “engaged fallibilistic pluralism.”
A PDF version of the presentation, the Ethics of Philosophy, is available here.
Because these habits must be informed by digital practices, I’ve invited comment on an earlier draft of this paper here on this site, and received substantive feedback both in the comment section and via Twitter.
At Stony Brook, I will continue the process of drawing on a wider digital public to further develop the argument of the paper by live tweeting my talk and opening a space for ongoing conversation here on the blog.
