Among these are not only the major pragmatist John. In addition to Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Chauncey Wright-the most notable members of the club-Menand's field of vision encompasses a number of figures who influenced or were influenced by them. Although he devotes most attention to those who had been members of an informal discussion group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1870s, Menand casts his net beyond the membership of the Metaphysical Club. Menand's point of departure is the deeply personal encounters of the major pragmatic thinkers with the main events and circumstances of their own time, especially the Civil War. The pragmatists believed that the truth of ideas could be found in their practical consequences or usefulness rather than in some fixed and transcendent reality to which they supposedly corresponded. But it treats ideas in the way the pragmatists themselves treated them, as the product of living experience rather than as bloodless, disembodied abstractions. It is ultimately a book about ideas, especially the ideas associated with pragmatism-the dominant tendency in American philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rarely has a work of intellectual history been as widely noticed and acclaimed as this one. Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court William James, the father of modern American psychology and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, c. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |