Embodied Investments: The Truth about Bodies and Publics

In this reflection on Sarah M. Stitzlein’s Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens, I attend to the process of public-making and complicate the neat vignette of inquiry (the practice of truth-seeking and truth-telling) that undergirds Stitzlein’s account of honesty in democracy. In so doing, I demonstrate that our pragmatist archive needs attention. I argue contemporary pragmatists and philosophers of education ought to consult companion theories, like feminism, that take account of the historicity of ontology and the ontological roots of community making.