Pragmatism

An invaluable resource—and an absorbing read—for everyone who is interested in the roots of American culture.

Here are the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Sanders Peirce to Cornell West, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Richard Posner, and Richard Poirier, now collected and reprinted unabridged. All are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. They reflect the vital role that pragmatism has played in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets.CONTENTS


An Introduction to Pragmatism

A Note on the Selections


The First Generation

Charles Sanders Peirce
from "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (1968)
"The Fixation of Belief" (1877)
"How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878)
from "a Guess at the Riddle" (ca. 1890)
from "Evolutionary Love" (1893)
"A Definition of Pragmatism" (ca. 1904)


William James
from "Habit," in The Principles of Psychology (1890)
"The Will to Believe" (1896)
"What Pragmatism Means," in Pragmatism (1907)
"Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," in Pragmatism (1907)
from "A Pluralistic Universe (1909)


Oliver Wendell Holmes
from "Lecture I: Early Forms of Liability," in The Common Law (1881)
from "Lecture III:Torts--Trespass and Negligence," in The Common Law (1881)
from "Privilege, Malice, and Intent" (1894)
"The Path of the Law" 91897)
from "Ideals and Doubts" (1915)
"Natural Law" (1918)
from Abrams v. United States (1919)


John Dewey
"The Ethics of Democracy" (1888)
"Theories of Knowledge," in Democracy and Education (1916)
from "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917)
"Experience, Nature and Art," in Experience and Nature (1925)
"I Believe" (1939)


Jane Addams
from "A Function of the Social Settlement" (1899)


George Herbet Mead
"The Mechanism of Social Consciousness" (1912)
"A Contrast of Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self" (ca. 1927)



Contemporary Pragmatism

Richard Rorty
"Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida" (1978-79)
"Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism" (1983)


Hilary Putnam
"Fact and Value," in Reason, Truth and History (1981)


Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
from "Against Theory" (1982)


Richard J. Bernstein
"Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds" (1988)


Cornel West
from "Prophetic Pragmatism," in The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989)


Richard A. Posner
"A Pragmatist Manifesto," in The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990)


Richard Poirier
"Reading Pragmatically," in Poetry and Pragmatism (1992)


Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob from "The Future of History," in Telling the Truth About History (1994)


Bibliography


Notes


Index
LOUIS MENAND is Professor of English at Harvard. His book The Metaphysical Club (2001) won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. He is also the author of American Studies (2002) and Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context 91987; new edition 2004) and the editor of The Future of Academic Freedom (1996). He was contributing editor of The New York Review of Books from 1994 to 2001. Since 2001, he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker.