The Community of Possible Moral Relations
Randall Auxier, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
The metaphysical and logical constitution of moral relatedness is often measured by the criterion of intelligence –we have moral relations with “other intelligence.” This is a philosophical error, morally, logically, metaphysically. The existence or moral relations in no way depends upon the presence of “intelligence,” let alone rationality, whether human or extra-human. In this essay I will use the philosophies of Whitehead and Royce to show that the “community” of possible moral relations is inclusive of all actual physical and cosmic relations, and the community implies obligations: specifically the obligation to intensify some of those relations through both action and non-action.
Claiming the Moral Self through an Ideal Space to Be
Amrita Banerjee, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Although space-based injustices have disproportionately affected marginalized moral subjects, space has not figured as a primary concept in moral theory. Consequently, we are left with “dispossessed” moral subjects. I believe that the standpoint of the dispossessed subject provides us with a unique opportunity to develop a spatialized understanding of ethics. In this paper, I deploy resources from early twentieth century feminist pragmatism in America as well as feminist work from colonial India in this period. The notion of an “emplaced” moral self is developed. Coming to a moral self is conceptualized as being intimately tied to finding an ideal space that allows one to cultivate a robust moral imagination. Spaces such as Hull House (in Jane Addams’ work) or Tarini Bhavan (in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s work) can become blueprints for conceptualizing such spaces. These spaces become integral to the development of a relational and imaginative sense of moral self. As dispossessed subjects find a home here, an embodied form of moral cosmopolitanism can emerge. The dialogue between American pragmatism and feminism in India hopes to generate an anti-colonial feminist approach to core concepts in pragmatist ethics. The question of reclaiming moral subjecthood, in turn, is linked to a claim to space.
Dewey, Globalism, And Education: Pragmatism’s Challenges and Challenges to Pragmatism
Deron Boyles, Distinguished University Professor, Georgia State University
This paper explores connections between global capital and ethics to argue for a critical pragmatist, Deweyan reconstruction of democratic education. Given the wide diversity of educational aims around the world, including aims antithetical to freedom of thought, inclusivity, and intellectual depth, this task is both challenging and necessary. The task is challenging because of the wide spectrum of international contexts, including the tensions among and between nation-states, religious fundamentalism, and economic manipulations. The task is necessary because the consequences of immigration, warring countries and groups, and neoliberalism represent no less than existential threats to human existence.
The Doubled and Divided Self: a Naturalist Approach
Lyubov Bugaeva, Professor, St. Petersburg University
New reproductive biotechnologies, especially prospective human cloning, are a serious challenge to the autonomy and integrity of the Self, and the clone (the ‘new double’) discourse causes serious anxiety, making the duplication imagery highly demanded in fiction and films. There is also a new and interesting twist to the phenomenon of the double presented as the self, which is divided between different spheres of life, that raises a number of intriguing issues, e.g., whether the double and the Self maintain the same identity and what traits are constituent of identity “in trouble”. The paper explores the question of the sameness and contributing to a relational theory of the self by expanding its application to the doubled or divided.
Perception and Understanding of Health, Illness and Pain: Rorty between Gadamer and Dennett
Kristina Bosáková, Associate Professor, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University
The aim of the paper is to analyze and compare the perception and understanding of health, illness, and pain from the perspectives of philosophical hermeneutics, pragmatism, and the philosophy of mind, with an accent on the middle position of Rorty´s pragmatism between the philosophical hermeneutics and the philosophy of mind. Although Gadamer tends to prefer the contextual understanding of health, illness and pain, his claims about the universal rational legacy of hermeneutics seems to situate him into the proximity of the theory of privileged representations. On the other hand, both, Gadamer and Rorty agree on the unity of body and mind and in consequence also on the equality between the natural and the social sciences in their representation of the reality. Dennett is as sceptical as Rorty towards the theory of privileged interpretations practiced among others also in the contemporary medicine, but his understanding of human consciousness, described frequently as a software is placing Rorty closer to Gadamer´s hermeneutics than to the philosophy of mind.
Emerson and Education
James Campbell, Distinguished University Professor, University of Toledo
This paper is an attempt to reconnect our understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson with his pragmatic roots through an emphasis upon his educational thought. After a brief introduction that emphasizes the importance of breadth for any philosophy, it considers the interactions within his central triad of Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, and Democracy. Turning more specifically to what education is and might be, we see the primacy of Emerson’s emphasis upon respect for the student. He develops this most clearly in “The American Scholar,” where he details the sources of education in nature, others, and action. Next comes a consideration of what he sees as the educational tasks of the scholar: to advance novelty and faith, to provide guidance and criticism, and to allow for self-exploration. Throughout, Emerson preserves the global implications of the philosophical life.
Feminist Pragmatism and post-Versailles International Society: Jane Addams, Publicness and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom as a Transnational Counterpublic
Molly Cochran, Reader in International Relations, Oxford Brookes University
It is the argument of this paper that at the dawn of a new form of global governance, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1915 and led by its International President Jane Addams, conducted international advocacy at the League of Nations and theorised the international, building sites of feminist transnational relational activity in which they trialled a nascent international principle immanent within social practices of interwar international society that I label as ‘publicness’. It is Dewey who inquired into the public and its problems and develops a theory of valuation, but it is Jane Addams and WILPF who put valuation into practice, drawing on publicness as a working value they trialled as a transnational counterpublic that sought to ameliorate interwar international indeterminacies.
Teaching Indigenous and Pragmatist Philosophies of Place
Anna Cook, Associate Professor and Head of Philosophy, University of the Fraser Valley
During a recent meeting with philosophy faculty talking about efforts at Indigenization within their respective academic institutions, a participant sarcastically asked if the focus on Indigenous philosophers meant that we should also have a class on Finnish philosophers. I was left momentarily speechless, unsure how to respond. The answer that came to me a day too late: They might want a course on Finnish philosophy in Finland; or rather that we might want our course content to reflect where we are. As such, my talk is an opportunity to think together about how to consider the possibilities and limits of a place-based approach to philosophy education. I show how both American pragmatist and Indigenous philosophical traditions provide support for the position that philosophy education should reflect problems in lived experience, which has particular implications when considering how philosophy is taught in settler colonial contexts. This, in turn, can provide a response to professors who are reluctant to incorporate Indigenous philosophy into their curricula. The commitment to place (and its subsequent relational ontology) not only provides justification for the need for philosophical inquiry to respond to problems in lived experience, it also re-envisions the goals and methods of philosophy education. Given the theme of this year’s meeting, I will end by reflecting on whether the emphasis on philosophical inquiry as responsive to problems in a particular place might risk making philosophy education too focused on the local, at the expense of a broader global approach.
The Specter of Disembodiment: Rethinking Education in the Age of New Immersive Digital Experiences
Phillip Dorstewitz, Associate Professor, American University of Ras Al Khaimah
A great translocation is well under way. The next generation is beginning to inhabit immersive 3-D VR AR and MR spaces as quasi native lifeworlds. Even though digital platforms, like online games and regions of the emerging metaverse, appear experientially and imaginatively opulent, educators fear that they limit the fields of experience of students and flatten human existence and do not adequately prepare them for their lives and careers. Instead of worrying how poorly experiences made in online games and regions of the emerging metaverse will prepare students for adult life in the “real” world, educators should reflect on what life will be possible within a fully-fledged metaverse. In this contribution I will trace three worries about life in VR, AR and mixed environments, and discuss how answering them will relate to concerns that informed Dewey’s education theory: 1. While Dewey maintains that education has its chief purpose in enriching experience, replicable digital “non-places” could reduce depth and complexity human experience. 2. Dewey envisions education as creative and imaginative engagement with indeterminate practical situations. However, low-stakes tasks and solving of predefined “gamified” problems could fail to develop competent situational judgment and imaginative problem solving. 3. While Dewey sees education environments as germ cells and incubators of democratic life by inviting opportunities for sharing experience and connecting with the world outside the classroom, fleeting social interaction in the metaverse, with ever new players who hide behind avatars or turn out to be AI bots could lead to an atrophied understanding of social participative relationships and politics. The metaverse and cryptographic technology could favor political views that prioritize individualism and libertarian freedoms or even authoritarian mindsets over solidarity or communitarian values of a socially embedded democratic life. These are not unavoidable consequences of “the great relocation” to virtual worlds, but a question of how we help the next generation transition and settle in new technologically immersive environments.
Why Pragmatism? Which Pragmatism?
Ľubomír Dunaj, University Assistant, Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna
In his reply to Peter Wagner’s critique that there might be skeptical and conservative undertones in Jóhann P. Árnason’s work, the criticized author answered: „I am untroubled by the suggestion that there are conservative undertones in my theorizing. Sometime in the 1970s, Leszek Kolakowski wrote an essay called ‘How to be a conservative liberal socialist’; his thesis was that it is possible to imagine a coherent position drawing in selective ways on the three traditions mentioned in the title. The argument can be taken seriously without accepting the particular combination that Kolakowski had in mind; if we look for examples of thinkers fitting the general description, Emile Durkheim and Jan Patočka may be the first who come to mind.” In my talk I will attempt to explain on what basis Árnason arrived at this position, and what it might mean for contemporary political philosophy. In my view, Árnason’s argument implies that even after more than 200 years of the development of Western modern civilization, none of the three main political ideologies of the “modern world” – liberalism, conservatism, or socialism – is capable of permanently and exclusively determining the character of modernity. Philosophically, what is of interest to me is mainly the extent to which such a position corresponds to the philosophy of pragmatism (despite the internal pluralism of this philosophical movement), and also whether there is anything that Arnason’s “civilizational analysis” can add to existing versions of pragmatist political philosophy. I am assuming that the answer is affirmative.
Disclosing Global and Pluralistic Pragmatic Values: Solving the Global Scourge of Women’s Oppression and Criminalization
Rebecca Farinas, Lecturer in Philosophy, Texas State University
Thinking initially in terms of Classical American pragmatism, I find varied thoughts carrying forward a value-oriented world view. Most importantly to my interests here I read Jane Addams’ principles of cosmopolitanism as a value theory. I will focus on common interests in respect to three “essential” and global pragmatic values; 1) the dignity of each human person 2) Individual freedom and creativity 3) peace and love as an awakening of our individual and collective moral actions. Addams consistently refers to our experiential spiritual, kindliness and love, as we can be ever ready to solve global problems in terms of a feminist axiology. However, she stops short of offering us a phenomenological explanation of love and care in relation to empathy and how such is intersected to human rights. As a somewhat reluctant pragmatist, Max Scheler’s thinking on “The Nature of Sympathy “fill in gaps of understanding our propensity for universal love, essential values, and emotional actions to further our moral goals. Problematically, an example of work to be done in this area, is to employ our value realizations and feminist pragmatic philosophies when changing the ongoing, world-wide criminalization and oppression of women.
Temporal Quality and the Poetics of Suffering
Bethany Henning, Assistant Professor, College of St. Scholastica
Late in his career, John Dewey argued for the existence of real individuals which depend on the metaphysical reality of quality and of time. Time and quality are precisely those rudiments denied by Laplace’s celestial mechanics, the Newtonian atom, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. The relegation of time and quality to mere “subjective” experience has had consequences, but one can only perceive these with a robust metaphysical imagination. A disavowal of metaphysics in the name of Marxism, physicalist “naturalism”—perhaps even pragmatism—has resulted in the atrophy of precisely this imaginative muscle. In the end of “Time and Individuality,” Dewey advocates for art as the indispensable compliment of science, for art is a “manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past.” (LW 14: 113) In recent centuries, the poetics of suffering have shifted from tragedy to horror. In this transformation we can trace the forfeiture of a cultural imagination that has the requisite metaphysics to grapple with loss.
The Tragic, Pragmatism and Dystopia or Why James, Hook, Dewey and King were Wrong about Experience but Right about Fiction
Leonard Harris, Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics, Purdue University.
The tragic, I argue, is a form of necro-being – living death. The tragic is absolute irredeemable misery, unresolvable calamity and stolen material life. My argument method is the following: light reductio absurdum. I describe several concepts of the tragic and argue that they have deep limitations. This is a ‘light’ reductio because there are innumerable concepts of the tragic, but I hope the concepts I discuss – concepts of the tragic by William James, Sidney Hook, John Dewey and its antonym, hope, by M.L. King, Jr., and there deep limitations provide a sufficient array of concepts to recommend the alternative view of the tragic I propose. Classical pragmatists characteristically argued that reflection, creativity, instrumental reason, experimental reasoning, deliberation, experience and a healthy sense of fallibilism supports warranted beliefs. However, there no world where trial and error has not meant genocide, rape and pillage; no world of third person objective observers resting on cultural magnanimous experiences; no world where normal everyday experience does not entail the draconian. Contrary to James and Hook, the tragic, I contend, is not failing to have some tastes, desires or preferences satisfied, but the possibility of absolute incommensurability, options and the lack of options. Unlike accounts that place a great deal of weight on our experiences to guide choices, imagined futures should not be limited to reliance on generic traits of experience nor experienced historical conditions. An insurrectionist spirit makes it possible to imagine a future without necro-being.
Communicative-Pragmatic or Neo-Confucian Universalism? On Moral Genealogies as Sources for Global Politics
Hans-Herbert Kögler, Professor of Philosophy, University of North Florida; Alpen-Adria University
Pragmatism’s focus on the contextual, local, situated-experimental sources of social progress may at first seem to conflict with the scope and aims of global philosophy. Yet in recent times, two arguably pragmatically defined approaches made explicit strides toward (re-) claiming the grounds of global ethics and transnational political philosophy. Both late Jürgen Habermas in Another History of Philosophy as well as the Neo-Confucian approaches of Tongdong Bai and Zhao Tingyang engage in moral genealogies to unearth vital and promising resources for a normatively structured new world order, based on meticulously culled principles and ideals from their respective traditions like human equality, universal moral respect, empathic concern for the Other, and a relational sense of being and belonging. Given that such an undertaken must be reflexively situated in the multiplicity of Axial Age origins, which share certain assumptions but also fuel considerable differences, the issue arises how to critically assess both their methodological promise as well as the normative substance for their stated goal to reground global political philosophy. My analysis will focus first on Habermas’s attempt to reconcile his postmetaphysical self-understanding with the promise of a hermeneutic pragmatism that maintains universalist moral claims within contingent traditions, second turn the Neo-Confucian project of reconstructing the metaphysical scheme of the Tianxia system (‘All under Heaven’) as a viable concept of reconciling historico-political and cultural differences within a universal framework of values, to finally suggest—based on immanent criticisms of both approaches—that the genealogical method needs to be complemented by phenomenological insights concerning universal recognition, projective empathy, and the reflexive hermeneutic appropriation of one’s own as well as another’s tradition.
Placing Philosophy in the Parks: A Neighborhood Praxis Towards a Global Orientation
Barbara J. Lowe, Professor of Philosophy, St. John Fisher University
“Philosophy in the Parks” is a project that includes a college course and, separately, a series of nature-based community workshops. The project is “place-based” and feminist-pragmatist in orientation. At its foundation, this project reinforces a relational understanding of the self and affords participants an opportunity to come to know the community, its issues, and, ultimately, themselves differently and more deeply than would have otherwise been possible without participation in the project. Ultimately, the project seeks to foster what Jane Addams called a “neighborhood point of view” and lay the foundation for “international mindedness” or, in other words, a global sense of citizenship and responsibility. Thus, the goal of the program is threefold: to foster understanding and appreciation of local parks and green spaces, to engage in place-based dialogue about presenting philosophical questions or issues while being mindful of multiple perspectives, and to foster a habit of being in and engaging with the world that is “glocal,” i.e. local in focus but global in mindset.
Denialism and Its Consequences: The Epistemic Injustice of National Narratives
Armen Marsoobian, Professor of Philosophy, Southern Connecticut State University
I will explore how national narratives are inevitably forms of epistemic injustice, depriving individuals of epistemic and moral agency. Denying access to knowledge about the past is a tool of all autocratic regimes, commonly used for the purpose of retaining power and exerting dominance over individuals or groups subordinate to the ruling elite. Yet such narratives and the falsifications used to buttress them, are not the exclusive instruments of autocracies but can be found to pervade the national narratives of what we often nominally label as democracies. The denial of crimes against humanity and genocide are the most egregious examples of the harms perpetrated against their victims and survivors. Yet the potential harm is greater, for such denialism lays the basis for new crimes and injustices in the future. I will illustrate these harms by examining historical examples of institutional and structural denialism.
Epistemology Naturalized and the Conceptual Systems in the Cupboard
Lee A. McBride, III., Professor of Philosophy, College of Wooster
Lee McBride has articulated a philosophical position that subscribes to an unfinished amoral universe, incommensurability, and human fallibility—a world without antecedent immutable truths or sure-fire algorithmic decision-making procedures. McBride emphasizes the limits of efficacious reasoning and the folly of absolutism, and yet he remains resolute about the need for an epistemology based on more than armchair intuitions. In this paper, McBride advocates an experimental/genetic approach to epistemology—an epistemology naturalized. Distinguishing (i) epistemology demonstrated in a (Cartesian) geometric manner (more geometrico demonstrata) from (ii) epistemology approached with a social and fallibilist genetic methodology, McBride argues that the latter offers a testable, evidence-based approach to actual predicaments and highly contentious disputes. Nevertheless, McBride notes that each of our conceptual systems rely upon postulates and purported axioms. As such, our favored epistemological systems are at bottom selected for pragmatic reasons and hence remain subject to overhaul.
Absolute Pragmatism as Global Philosophy
Scott L. Pratt, Professor and Head of Philosophy, University of Oregon
The present world faces a range of seemingly intractable problems from pandemics to climate change, from refugee crises to rising violent nationalisms and increasingly autocratic governments. Pragmatism has at times claimed for itself the potential to help address major social problems including those that disrupt the basic commitments of a democratic society. I will consider a criticism of pragmatism by Leonard Harris that admits that pragmatism provides a method for addressing problems, it does not and perhaps cannot provide values that are necessary to guide change. Josiah Royce challenged what he called “pure pragmatism” on similar grounds and proposed an alternative he called “absolute pragmatism” that recognizes a set of framing truths that govern the process of judgment and the irrevocability of actions taken. I will develop the idea of the absolute in this context, illustrate the view in relation to Dewey and the more recent accounts of pragmatism given by Brandom and Rorty, say what the “absolute” adds to pragmatism, and suggest the implications of absolute pragmatism as a global, critical, and decolonial philosophy grounded in what African American cultural theorist Fred Moten has called improvisational foundations.
Social Values and Political Principles
John Ryder, Independent Scholar
A political philosophy draws on a number of background conceptions and applies social values and political principles as justificatory criteria. There are three background conceptions on which this political philosophy draws. The first is political ecumenism; the second is the generally pragmatist idea that the way we live is a more significant factor in determining political structure and practice than are ideas or conceptions; the third is a pragmatic naturalist understanding of experience as the mutually constitutive engagement of individuals with their environing conditions. The first lends the philosophy its breadth, the second its grounding in lived interests over deliberation and conceptions of the good, and the third provides the context for understanding the place of political affairs in our lives. Together these background ideas provide the basis for the philosophy’s values and principles, which are the focus of these remarks. There are six social values: equality, autonomy, freedom, empowerment, pluralism, and interests. And there are six political principles: the centrality of common interests, the expression of social values in political life, equality of opportunity, the proper use of political authority, the coherence of political policies, and internationalization. In these remarks I will suggest a rationale for these values and principles.
Civics in a Postcolonial Global World and the Potential of Pragmatism
Radim Šíp, Associate Professor, Tomas Bata University
In the Czech Republic, there is a lack of a backbone idea for civic education. Czech teachers maneuver between education, which is supposed to provide a foundation for all social sciences, and building nationalistic sentiments. Both approaches do not allow societies to educate citizens to be able to live in a postcolonial democratic society. This has negative consequences for both the quality of political will of individuals and the resilience of society. Citizenship in a global world must be geographically and value-based, but also global. With its emphasis on the democratic ideal, the central relationship between ends and means, and the continuity between humans and their environment, pragmatism provides a good background for building civics for the 21st century. The text demonstrates this idea using proves of Dewey and M. Johnson’s work.
Reassessing the Truth
Jane Skinner, Research Development Practitioner, The Cape Peninsula University of Technology
This paper draws on Larry Hickman’s exploration of Dewey’s ‘Pragmatic Technology’ in order to argue for a reassessment of method concerning the ‘mind-body problem’. It accepts Margolis’s position that the truth must be understood as ‘natural, but not naturalizable’. I take forward arguments I first published in an article in Metaphilosophy to the effect that the widely accepted ‘causal closure of physics’ locks the debate into an untenable materialist position, which ignores that life and consciousness remain completely unknown (immaterial) phenomena at this time. I argue that physics alone as a ‘tool of enquiry’, is therefore an unsuitable technology with which to tackle the problem. Quantum mechanics also remains within ‘naturalizable’ positions as currently understood in the cognitive sciences. The paper also discusses the dangers apparently inherent in the assumption of inappropriate ‘tools of inquiry’ in this regard. The paper will conclude my three recent papers involving broadly Deweyan themes.
Who’s Afraid of Inquiry?
Mark D. Tschaepe, Professor of Philosophy, Prairie View A&M University
In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler interrogates what they call the anti-gender ideology movement, which is a set of stances and practices across the globe that oppose critically inquiring about binary gender categories, heteronormativity, and histories of race and racism. I respond to Butler’s call to action by expounding and expanding upon queer pragmatism to facilitate open inquiry. Here, my focus is on queering Dewey’s philosophy of inquiry to develop critical approaches to interpellations of identity, such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability, that challenge essentialism and foster equity. To do this, I draw together tools from pragmatist traditions and from work often classified as queer studies or queer theory. I argue that drawing these together supplies a strengthened set of tools for sustaining and improving inquiry, especially as a counter to hegemonic positions that attempt to impose heteronormative restrictions upon inquiry and identity.
The Open Spaces of Democracy: Pragmatist Placemaking, Peacebuilding, and Public Lands
Tess Varner, Associate Professor, Concordia College (Minnesota)
Land-use issues regularly arise in the context of social and political problems, but the debates that dominate tend to revolve around security of geographic borders and boundaries, natural resource scarcity, declining biodiversity, and the like. These are crucial to address. But they are not the only land-use matters that contribute to the instability of our overall social and democratic landscape, in the US and around the world. In this paper, I develop a feminist-pragmatist consideration of public lands, situating them as “open spaces of democracy”—spaces for public deliberation and for reshaping a collective identity in light of the urgent needs for justice and amelioration. I suggest that public lands are uniquely suited for meeting community needs and for addressing social ills. Like settlement houses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they can serve a public function; they can be created, redesigned, and better used in the service of stabilizing and enriching our fragile social and physical landscapes. In this paper, I draw from the Norwegian philosophical tradition’s strong emphases on peace and deep connection to the natural world and highlight important connections between this tradition, pragmatism, and personalism as I expand upon the potential for placemaking and peacebuilding through the open spaces of democracy.
Insurrectionist Ethics and the Putnam-Rorty Debate
Chris Voparil, Associate Professor, Lynn University
Once central to the pragmatic tradition’s contemporary vitality, the spirited exchanges between Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty have come to perplex interpreters. Joseph Margolis recently referred to it as “that dead end of a dispute between Rorty and Putnam … which went nowhere philosophically” yet nevertheless “revitalized the academy’s interest in pragmatism in the most remarkable way” (2012, 2, 15). Several decades of careful evaluation by scholars of their explicit positions and arguments around realism, justification, truth, and correctness, have illuminated very little about their ultimate disagreement. This paper revisits the dispute and argues that its fundamental lessons can be seen by foregrounding Putnam’s and Rorty’s greatest ethical and political fears and their attempts to construe the norms of pragmatism to protect against them. This framing enables productive dialogue with Leonard Harris’s notion of communities of resistance and yields insights into pragmatic political normativity’s relation to global injustice.
Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: Still Relevant Today?
Sandra Zákutná, Associate Professor of History of Philosophy, University of Prešov
The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of Immanuel Kant’s theory of cosmopolitanism, as presented primarily in his short essay “Towards Perpetual Peace” (1795). In the paper I focus on two aspects of the possibility of a slow approach to the idea of perpetual peace. First, I examine Kant’s political proposals, including the establishment of a federation of free states, adherence to universal hospitality, and the promotion of republican government, in the context of modern global challenges. Second, I consider anthropological issues related to the idea of perpetual peace, emphasizing the importance of the individual’s self-understanding that the idea of peace is individually conditioned, i.e. that people should understand themselves and all other people not only as citizens of a particular nation, but as citizens of the world and as representatives of humanity. Through the lens of pragmatism, the paper attempts to evaluate the practical implications of Kant’s principles and to offer a dynamic perspective on how Kant’s ideas can be interpreted in today’s world.