Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction
Cambridge University Press, 6/9/2014
EAN 9780521765336, ISBN10: 0521765331
Hardcover, 288 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Pragmatism and American Experience provides a lucid and elegant introduction to America's defining philosophy. Joan Richardson charts the nineteenth-century origins of pragmatist thought and its development through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the major first- and second-generation figures and how their contributions continue to influence philosophical discourse today. At the same time, Richardson casts pragmatism as the method it was designed to be: a way of making ideas clear, examining beliefs, and breaking old habits and reinforcing new and useful ones in the interest of maintaining healthy communities through ongoing conversation. Through this practice we come to perceive, as William James did, that thinking is as natural as breathing, and that the essential work of pragmatism is to open channels essential to all experience.
1. Introduction
thirteen ways of looking at pragmatism
2. Context
William James, into the cosmic weather
3. Method
Charles Sanders Pierce, the call of the wild
4. Purpose
John Dewey, the conduct of life
5. Effects 1
Stanley Cavell, squaring the circle
transcendentalist pragmatism
6. Effects 2
Richard Rorty, sea change and/or ironic scraping
Bibliography.