pragmatism existentialism

Pragmatism :Metaphysics

James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality. Radical empiricism, or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.

epistemology

The epistemology of early pragmatism was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin. Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated abiological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms use to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam would later call metaphysical realism), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with.

Concept of truth

Instead of truth being ready-made for us, James asserts we and reality jointly "make" truth. This idea has two senses: (1) truth is mutable, (often attributed to William James and F.C.S. Schiller); and (2) truth is relative to a conceptual scheme (more widely accepted in Pragmatism

Existentialism

The general concern of existentialism is to give an account of what it is like to exist as a human being in the world. Epistemologically, it is denied that there can be an absolutely objective description of the world as it is without the intervention of human interests and actions. The world is a 'given' and there is no epistemological scepticism about its existence; it has to be described in relation to ourselves. There is no fixed essence to which beings have to conform in order to qualify as human beings; we are what we decide to be .. The issue of freedom and choice are of crucial importance in existentialism. Sartre thinks that authentic choices are completely undetermined. ... If we make our decisions merely by reference to an external moral code or set of procedures, then we are, similarly, not arriving at authentic choices. Buber disagrees with Sartre over what it is to choose: he maintains that values which have been discovered, not invented, can be adopted for one's life.
Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Marcel, early Simone de Beauvoir.