Pragmatism: A philosophical confluence of belligerent streams of thought

Mindaralew Zewdie
Department of Philosophy, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

Abstract

The raison detre of this study is bringing to the daylight that pragmatism is a philosophical stream of thought into which antagonistic or at least different brooks of thought scuttle. Not to put too fine a point on it, pragmatism houses or is home to a swathe of philosophical positions that are, at least at first sight, known to have nothing in common, or repellent to one another, or nemesis to each other. This is so when we surmise that pragmatism nests such belligerent to one another philosophical positions as Marxism and Liberalism, nominalsim and realism, the religion dipped and dyed stream of John Dewey and the science docked ferry of Charles Sanders Pierce etc. To help the lait motif of this study meet its conferred goals, I made use of the methods that are home to almost all philosophical researches. That is to say, this study avails itself of the rational and critical methods of inferential reasoning. Applying rigorously the rational and critical methods insinuated at above, this study finally draw a conclusion which holds: Pragmatism is a philosophical school of thought that enables other schools of thought, which stand in total contradistinction to one another, to see eye to eye. What is more, pragmatism has that philosophical elasticity which enables it to accommodate various ideas in such a way that they are made to have at least a point at which they overarch.

Keywords: Pragmatism, school of thought, rational, logical, confulnce of thought