"The Pragmatist Revival and George Herbert Mead": A Proposed Special
Session for MLA '06 in Philadelphia

The "revival" of the American pragmatist tradition of the last twenty
years has led scholars across disciplines to fruitful engagements
with the thought of James, Peirce, and Dewey. However, the fourth
member of the "classical pragmatists," George Herbert Mead, has
received very little sustained interest outside the social sciences.
This panel hopes to begin to redress this undue neglect. We seek
papers that examine the critical stakes entailed in Mead's various
contributions to pragmatism: his radical intersubjectivity, his
response to Einstein and Whitehead as registered in his conception of
temporality, his philosophy of the act. What sorts of cross-
fertilizations might Mead's work in these areas suggest vis à vis
continental philosophy, both "modern" and "post-modern"? In what
ways is Mead's work as a pragmatist theorist linked to his
internationalism and his position in the American progressivist
movement more generally? What, for that matter, is at stake in the
failure of neo-pragmatism to include Mead in its chart of the
pragmatist constellation? How might Mead's work obtain a Jamesian
"cash value" for the purposes of literary analysis?

Please email 500 word abstracts and a short CV to Christopher Hanlon
(chanlon_at_eiu.edu) or Jeffrey Insko (insko_at_oakland.edu) by March 27.

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Received on Tue Mar 07 2006 - 18:22:10 EST