Richard J. Bernstein

Richard Jacob Bernstein (May 14, 1932 – July 4, 2022) was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for Social Research, where he was Vera List Professor of Philosophy.

Bernstein wrote extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics.

Bernstein's work is best known for the way in which it examines the intersections between different philosophical schools and traditions, bringing together thinkers and philosophical insights that would otherwise remain separated by the analytic/continental divide in 20th century philosophy.

The pragmatic and dialogical ethos that pervades his works has also been displayed in a number of philosophical exchanges with other contemporary thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Agnes Heller, and Charles Taylor.

Bernstein was an engaged public intellectual concerned not only with the specialized debates of academic philosophy, but also with the larger issues that touch upon social, political, and cultural aspects of contemporary life.

Throughout his life Bernstein actively endorsed a number of social causes and was involved in movements of participatory democracy, upholding some of the cardinal virtues of the American pragmatist tradition, including a commitment to fallibilism, engaged pluralism, and the nurturing of critical communities.

Bernstein was born May 14, 1932, in Brooklyn to a second-generation Jewish immigrant family.

The youngest of three children, he attended Midwood High School, a public high school in Brooklyn where he first met his future wife Carol L. Bernstein.

Too young to be drafted into the Second World War, Bernstein enrolled as an undergraduate in the University of Chicago, where he fell in love with philosophy, eventually writing an honors thesis entitled "Love and Friendship in Plato: A Study of the Lysis and the Phaedrus".

His classmates included Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Mike Nichols, George Steiner, and the person who would become one of Bernstein's closest friends and philosophical interlocutors, Richard Rorty.

Upon graduation, and partly because he needed more credits to begin graduate studies, Bernstein returned to New York City for a couple of years to study at Columbia University where he took courses on a variety of subjects, ranging from ancient Greek to book binding, and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree, graduating summa cum laude.

In 1953, following Rorty's advice, he went to Yale University to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, and under the advice of pragmatist John E. Smith, wrote his dissertation on John Dewey's Metaphysics of Experience.

This was a time when interest in Dewey was reaching an all-time low, partly due to the rising influence of analytic philosophy and the prejudiced conviction that there was not much to be learned from the Classical American Pragmatists.

Indeed, for many philosophers under the sway of the analytic wave, the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey was just a half-baked version of the real philosophical inquiries being conducted by analytic philosophy.

From early on, however, Bernstein became more and more aware of the damaging consequences of what he labeled "analytic ideology", i.e. "the belief that the analytic style is the only game in town and the rest of philosophy is to be dismissed as simply not really worthwhile."

Of course, this "analytic ideology" should not be confused with the hard-won results of analytic philosophy.

One of the reasons he decided to go to Yale was because it was one of the few departments that resisted this questionable ideology, offering a stimulating atmosphere where thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were read with the same enthusiasm and seriousness as Wittgenstein and Carnap.

There, he studied under a remarkable group of teachers, including Carl Gustav Hempel, John Smith, George Schrader, and Paul Weiss.

Bernstein began to teach his first courses at Yale around 1954, when he was 22 years old.

In 1958 after a year as Fulbright lecturer in Hebrew University, he returned to Yale as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

His return coincided with the arrival of a new member of the faculty, a thinker that would greatly influence Bernstein's own work and his approach to philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars.

As Bernstein recalls: "It was Sellars who taught me that one could employ analytic techniques to deal with fundamental philosophic issues. I strongly admired the way in which he combined a sophisticated understanding of the history of philosophy with the 'new way of words' and I attended many of his seminars during a highly creative stage of his philosophic development."

In 1964 he became the editor of The Review of Metaphysics, the philosophic journal founded by Paul Weiss, and one of the few that accepted contributions from different traditions and schools of thought.

In its pages one could find articles from prominent analytic thinkers like Quine and Sellars side-by-side with articles by Leo Strauss and even translations of Heidegger.

That same year he joined a group of faculty to participate in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests, and in the summer he traveled to Mississippi to take part in the Freedom Summer Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In 1965, after teaching at Yale for almost ten years, and in spite of having the unanimous support of the entire philosophy faculty and a large number of students, he was denied tenure by the Yale Tenure Committee.

This event, which is sometimes referred to as the Bernstein Affair, sparked a number of student protests and eventually led to reforms in the tenure system at Yale.

Professor Paul Weiss summed up the inconformity of the philosophical community when he stated that "the committee came to its conclusion slowly and conscientiously, but that does not mean that its decision was not stupid, unfair, dismaying, and one from which it will take this university and the department a long time to recover."

Other philosophy departments soon tried to recruit the young Bernstein, who after considering offerings from more than thirty institutions decided to go to Haverford College, a prestigious liberal arts college where his wife could also teach college nearby, at Bryn Mawr, and "he was allowed to build a philosophy department that would be at the center of the undergraduate curriculum. The Bernsteins stayed at those institutions for 23 years.

During his time at Haverford, Bernstein published some of his most famous books, including Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (1971), The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (1978), Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (1983), and Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (1986).

In 1972 he met Jürgen Habermas, establishing a friendship that grew over the years and that is reflected in the exchanges and projects they undertook over the ensuing four decades.

In 1976, while spending a semester at Haverford, Habermas asked Bernstein to join him in directing a seminar to be held in Dubrovnik in support of eight dissident Yugoslavian Marxists of the Praxis group who had been dismissed from Belgrade University because of their political views.

This gesture of solidarity became an international institution, attracting, over the years, a group of intellectuals including Albrecht Wellmer, Charles Taylor, Anthony Giddens, Cornelius Castoriadis, Richard Rorty, Alain Touraine, Agnes Heller, and the young graduate students Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Judith Butler.

Bernstein's involvement in the Dubrovnik seminar expanded when, in 1980, he became the founding co-editor of Praxis International, the successor of the important Yugoslav journal Praxis, where critics of Stalinism and proponents of a "Marxist humanism" would write.

In 1989 Bernstein was elected president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, delivering a presidential address entitled "Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds".

That same year he was invited to join the Graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, which at the time was experiencing hardships.

Together with Agnes Heller and Reiner Schürmann, Bernstein led the reconstruction of the philosophy department, and he served as chair from 1989 to 2002.

During his time at the New School Bernstein wrote books on Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, radical evil, pragmatism, violence, irony, and the relation between humans and nature.

Bernstein work embodies the pragmatist ethos that he has tirelessly articulated since his first publications.

For him, engaged pluralism, fallibilism, and public deliberation are not abstract philosophical concepts but practical guidelines that must orient responsible action.