DYSFUNCTIONAL INHERITANCES
The website of David M. Jacobson
David M. Jacobson is a writer, an attorney and an educator, who lives in Bellevue, Washington. This website contains a selection of his academic writings, as well as recent essays on topics in philosophy and literary and political theory.
"Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? . . . To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson's Pragmatic Vision
"Emerson's Pragmatic Vision is an excellent and thorough piece of reflection and scholarship. Jacobson . . . shows how "The Method of Nature" marks a turning point in which Emerson moves decisively beyond his earlier humanism (with its attendant narcissism) toward a view which places the human process at the service of the much vaster and more compelling method of nature." Robert S. Corrigan
"Jacobson is to be admired for always seeking to underscore the richness, or 'eloquence,' of Emerson's synthesis rather than merely expose it from the point of view of the later, more radically pragmatic vision . . . ." Jonathan Levin
"For Jacobson, 'the duty Emerson ultimately sets out for the individual, his responsibility, . . . is to accommodate himself in earnest discernment to the power of the images that make up his world.' This provocative summation will strike a chord with Emerson scholars . . . ." Barbara Ryan
"Technology, Responsibility, and the Limits of Pragmatism"
The history of technology is more or less as long as human history. People have always been closely linked with the tools they fashioned and have used them to frame their experience of the environment around them. Each technological innovation disclosed new ways to move and change things and, thus, new ways to experience the world. Tools have not simply helped us get things done; within the range of their functionality, they have quite literally built people’s surrounding environment and, like Merleau-Ponty’s famous blind man’s cane, brought around and revealed the human world. Human history has thus unfolded through the reciprocity of people and their tools. Today, there is a good deal of talk about this reciprocity ....
"The word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For . . . man is a sign."
- C. S. Peirce