Book Cover, New Job, &c.

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated anything here.  That’s a sign of business not laziness, of course.  (It’s also a function of the increasingly-useful way in which status updates are handled on facebook.)

Two main pieces of news.

First, I am now living up in Eugene, Oregon where I have a one-year appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon.  I am (if it’s not obvious) quite pleased to be up here: great colleagues, great graduate students, great program, and a great place to live.

Hunkering down for a solid year of solid work in Eugene should give me the opportunity to update the blog more often.  So I plan to start on that.

Second, it now appears as if my book Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty will be out with Columbia University Press very soon (sometime next month, apparently).  I was quite pleased that Columbia was able to get the rights to an image of the painting that I have long hoped would grace the cover of the book, Ducham’s Nude Descending a Staircase, no.2.  You can read a little more about the book on Columbia UP’s website.

So, more soon I hope.  I’m investing lots of time in lots of projects right now.  Some of them will be bloggable in short order.

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Pragmatism in Obama’s Inaugural

We saw more pragmatism this week in Obama’s inaugural address (following up on earlier posts).  It was not quite the masterful literary piece that one might have expected given all that we have been hearing about how Obama wishes to position himself as the next Lincoln.  Lincoln was not only a president but also a poet: recall his “mystic chords of memory”.  Obama is not quite a poet, at least not yet.  But then again, I find the comparisons to Lincoln somewhat overstrained.  Obama is a pragmatist.  Lincoln was not (but perhaps the persident could not have been a pragmatist in those tumultuous years.)

In Obama’s inaugural address this Tuesday we heard his pragmatism once again.  It was forceful and proud, yet also humble and friendly.  This is as pragmatism should be: at once confident and inviting.

New Publication on Pragmatism

My latest publication is now out.  This paper is a version of the first chapter of my (hopefully) forthcoming book Pragmatism as Transitionalism.  As argued here, the book attempts to deploy themes of historicity and temporality found across the pragmatist tradition in order to, among other things, reconcile the ‘primapragmatism’ of James and Dewey with the ‘neopragmatism’ of Rorty and Brandom.  “Language is a Form of Experience: Reconciling Classical Pragmatism and Neopragmatism” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v43n4, Fall 2007: 694-727.  You can find it online here (subscription through your library is required): http://muse.jhu.edu.oca.ucsc.edu/journals/transactions_of_the_charles_s_peirce_society/v043/43.4koopman.pdf.