Pragmatism A Reader

by MENAND, LOUIS

• ISBN13: 9780679775447
• ISBN10: 0679775447
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-10-07
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Pragmatism has been called America's only major contribution to philosophy. But since its birth was announced a century ago in 1898 by William James, pragmatism has played a vital role in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets. Now the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty and Cornel West, have been brought together and reprinted unabridged. From the first generation of pragmatists, including the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, to the leading figures in the contemporary pragmatist revival, including the philosopher Hilary Putnam, the jurist Richard Posner, and the literary critic Richard Poirier, all the contributors to this volume are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. Edited and with an Introduction by Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader will provide both the general reader and the student of American culture with excitement and pleasure.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

An Introduction to Pragmatism	xi	(24)
A Note on the Selections	xxxv
The First Generation	1	(300)
Charles Sanders Peirce	3	(56)
from "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (1868)	4	(3)
"The Fixation of Belief" (1877)	7	(19)
"How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878)	26	(23)
from "A Guess at the Riddle" (ca. 1890)	49	(3)
from "Evolutionary Love" (1893)	52	(4)
"A Definition of Pragmatism" (ca. 1904)	56	(3)
William James	59	(77)
from "Habit," in The Principles of Psychology (1890)	60	(9)
"The Will to Believe" (1896)	69	(24)
"What Pragmatism Means," in Pragmatism (1907)	93	(19)
"Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," in Pragmatism (1907)	112	(20)
from A Pluralistic Universe (1909)	132	(4)
Oliver Wendell Holmes	136	(45)
from "Lecture I: Early Forms of Liability," in The Common Law (1881)	137	(2)
from "Lecture III: Torts--Trespass and Negligence," in The Common Law (1881)	139	(3)
from "Privilege, Malice, and Intent" (1894)	142	(3)
"The Path of the Law" (1897)	145	(25)
from "Ideals and Doubts" (1915)	170	(3)
"Natural Law" (1918)	173	(5)
from Abrams v. United States (1919)	178	(3)
John Dewey	181	(91)
"The Ethics of Democracy" (1888)	182	(23)
"Theories of Knowledge," in Democracy and Education (1916)	205	(14)
from "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917)	219	(14)
"Experience, Nature and Art," in Experience and Nature (1925)	233	(32)
"I Believe" (1939)	265	(7)
Jane Addams	272	(15)
from "A Function of the Social Settlement" (1899)	273	(14)
George Herbert Mead	287	(14)
"The Mechanism of Social Consciousness" (1912)	288	(8)
"A Contrast of Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self" (ca. 1927)	296	(5)
Contemporary Pragmatism	301	(168)
Richard Rorty	303	(34)
"Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida" (1978-79)	304	(25)
"Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism" (1983)	329	(8)
Hilary Putnam	337	(26)
"Fact and Value," in Reason, Truth and History (1981)	338	(25)
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels	363	(18)
from "Against Theory" (1982)	364	(17)
Richard J. Bernstein	381	(21)
"Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds" (1988)	382	(20)
Cornel West	402	(15)
from "Prophetic Pragmatism," in The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989)	403	(14)
Richard A. Posner	417	(19)
"A Pragmatist Manifesto," in the Problems of Jurisprudence (1990)	418	(18)
Richard Poirier	436	(20)
"Reading Pragmatically," in Poetry and Pragmatism (1992)	437	(19)
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob	456	(13)
from "The Future of History," in Telling the Truth About History (1994)	457	(12)
Bibliography	469	(6)
Notes	475	(40)
Index	515