“As a philosophy of experience, pragmatism sees one of its central aims as the re-fashioning of man’s habitual apparatus; but without a critical philosophy, such an adaptation risks falling sway to an adaptation to the existing structures of domination and exploitation.” ~ Daniel Tutt

I have been pursuing my own kind of synthesis, or at least productive remixing, of pragmatism and critical theory since my initial undergrad encounters with each of those strains of thinking. There is a lot of overlap in themes between pragmatism and critical theory, and both offer cognitive tools for differentiating the content and context of human reasoning and intellectual life. Each have important things to add to understanding social practices, communication, habitual culture and politics. And each has important things to say about the how we educate ourselves and engage the dominant discourses of out time.

Daniel Tutt provides some important points of consideration in any type of reconciliation between these two intellectual dispersals: HERE

The great European Marxist saw in American philosophy a form of thinking that refused speculative thought and that presented a form of reason adjusted to exploitation of the status quo. The confluence of American philosophy produced a most insidious form of idealism.

via The Missed Encounter Between Critical Theory And American Pragmatism — Daniel Tutt