Web Posted: 03/05/2006 12:00 AM CST

San Antonio Express-News

Before people commit acts, they commit ideas. Wars, persecutions and other forms of group mayhem nearly always arise from deeply held philosophical beliefs.

Even within the relatively peaceful United States, the polity is divided on core philosophical questions: What is real? What is truth? What does it mean to be a human being? What do we owe each other? How should we live?

Alas, the firmest and most dangerous convictions usually emerge from the most disordered, shallow, uncritical and ill-founded mental processing. Dogma trumps reason.

Disagreement would not vanish if we were all competent philosophers. That's OK. Diversity of opinion and belief is good. There are many routes to the Indies.

But one should choose one's route wisely and navigate it with skill. A grounding in philosophy, far from being a luxury for the leisure mind, is an essential and practical form of knowledge.

Thus, the most important event happening in San Antonio this week is the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of America Philosophy. It runs Thursday afternoon through Saturday morning, with most sessions taking place at the Gunter Hotel.

SAAP is one of many philosophical societies in the United States. Its niche is the peculiarly American brand of philosophy known as pragmatism, a tradition that began with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey.

You could think of pragmatism as the unphilosophy, or the anti- ismism. It takes its cue from James' famous question about truth claims: "What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

Several sessions during the SAAP meeting are of particular contemporary interest.

At the first plenary session, Steven Moore, co-director of the Center for Sustainable Development at UT-Austin, speaks on "Sustainable Cities, Storylines and Post-Katrina New Orleans." That session is open to the public at no charge; it starts at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the Witte Museum.

The rest of the conference is open to the public for a $20 fee.

A Friday morning session offers two papers on biological issues — one asks "What Can Evolutionary Biology Tell Philosophers, and Does It Matter?" The other proposes "A Peirceian Approach to the Morality of Abortion."

At the same time in another room, Terrance MacMillan reads a paper with the intriguing title: "So Cornel West, Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart Walk into a Bar: Public Intellectuals, SAAP, and the Need for Another Recovery of American Philosophy."

Among many papers to be read on Friday afternoon, one that sounds especially interesting is Jose-Antonio Orosco's "The Commonsense of Non-Violence: Time as a Political Resource in the Thought of Martin Luther King Jr. and César Chávez."

The full schedule for the annual meeting can be found on the Web at www.american-philosophy.org.

For a taste of the contemporary pragmatist tradition at its best, Google "Rorty Decline" to find a beautiful paper by Richard Rorty, "The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of Literary Culture."

Rorty argues there is no "natural terminus to inquiry" at the supposed "really real" claims of metaphysical philosophy and religion.

Indeed, the ground of inquiry has shifted, Rorty says, from those closed systems to the open-ended literary imagination and "the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human."

The cash value of that idea is priceless.