Harvey Cormier

Kantian ethics; Nietzschean arguments against morality; pragmatic ethics; animal rights; justifications for affirmative action; realistic, idealistic, and pragmatic theories of truth; concepts of knowledge and objectivity connected with these; pragmatism versus neo-pragmatism; philosophy and literature, Nelson Goodman's and Arthur Danto's philosophies of art, Marx-influenced theories of art and culture; ancient skepticism and stoicism; "Black philosophy" and arguments for the reality of "race" and against individualism; Cornel West's "prophetic pragmatism"; Peter Singer's comparisons of racism with "speciesism."

Harvey Cormier's dissertation was on the work of the psychologist and pragmatist philosopher William James. His work since then has taken on diverse subject matters such as Cornel West's Marx-influenced criticisms of James; Nietzsche on freedom and selfhood; the idea that Henry James the novelist was a pragmatist like his brother William; and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey considered as a work of modernist art. Cormier's book, The Truth Is What Works: William James, Pragmatism, and the Seed of Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), attributes to James the "Forrest Gump theory of truth," or the simple but profound idea that truth, like stupidity, is as it does or tends to do. Cormier thinks that this Darwinian "functionalist" approach to epistemology is the best one, and he is interested in the bearing of this idea on questions concerning psychology, evolution, human identity, and morality.