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The American Pragmatists . By Cheryl Misak . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2013, 304pp, £25 ISBN: 978-0-19-923120-1
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Cheryl Misak's invaluable The American Pragmatists provides an account of the most important pragmatist philosophers from the 1860s until the early twenty first century. Her aim is to analyze and evaluate the theses held by these thinkers as well as tracing the history of pragmatist thought. Pragmatism, as a distinctive American contribution to philosophy, was born around Harvard about 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce and William James together with lawyers such as Oliver Wendall Holmes forged their philosophical stance in the meetings of a Metaphysical Club, largely under the influence of Chauncey Wright. There is little evidence that they used the word 'pragmatism' to describe these views although, after 1898 both Peirce and James suggested that the term had been used in this way. The views later called 'pragmatism' were defended by Peirce in 'The fixation of belief' (1877) and 'How to make our ideas clear' (1878). In 1898, William James declared that he was a pragmatist, tracing it to 'Peirce's principle' and identifying it as 'method of settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable'. James identified pragmatism with the principle of pragmatism: and Peirce's with his 'pragmatic maxim'. Pragmatism quickly won both fame and notoriety, especially after John Dewey defended a related but different form of pragmatism which was more concerned with problem solving in the social and political realm. This form of pragmatism was of major importance until the 1940s, Dewey being recognized as a major public intellectual. But, especially with the growth of logical positivism and the influx of philosophers from Europe pragmatism appeared to many to have died with little chance of resuscitation; few philosophers would have called themselves pragmatists.
Few would have anticipated that, by the mid-1970s, things would change; Cheryl Misak's history of American pragmatism devotes whole chapters to leading figures who were still active after the 1990s, Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty: there are conferences about the 'Cambridge pragmatists'; and philosophers like Peirce and James are recognized as contributing to the contemporary debate. It is not just that there are contemporary philosophers who study Peirce and James and find value...