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From The New Yorker
A group portrait of four men—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey—who changed the way America thought. Because Menand, like his subjects, views ideas as being "soaked through" by the situations we find them in, his book embraces everything from Darwin, probability theory, and the battle of Antietam to infighting at the University of Chicago. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
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Review
“The Metaphysical Club is dramatic and persuasive ... something very like a history of the American mind at work.†―Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books
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Product details
Series: later printing
Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (April 10, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374528497
ISBN-13: 978-0374528492
Product Dimensions:
5.6 x 1.4 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
136 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#37,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I bought this book many, many years ago with every intention of reading it soon thereafter, but I had heard such good things about it that I wanted to wait until I had enough free time set aside to be able to fully savor it without any distractions. So, I waited. And I waited. And I kept on waiting, because I never could seem to find that ideal stretch of distraction-free time I was saving it for. All the while, it has been sitting on a shelf collecting dust. But a few weeks ago, while doing some much-needed spring cleaning, I came across the book and decided that I had put off reading it long enough. So, in spite of the fact that I never really did find the perfect time to read it, I finally did manage to get it read. My only regret is that I waited so long. It is an excellent book that really does live up to all the hype.'The Metaphysical Club' is the biography of four men and an idea. The four men are the legal scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (who would later become one of the most celebrated justices ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court), the psychologist and philosopher William James, the polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), and the philosopher and social reformer John Dewey. The idea, of course, is Pragmatism.Pragmatism is an innovative approach to doing philosophy that was developed by Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey (with contributions from numerous others, of course) in the period between the American Civil War and the First World War. Pragmatism is by far the most influential school of philosophical thought ever to come out of the United States, and it has been argued that Pragmatism reflects the American way of thinking better than any other philosophical movement. This is why Pragmatism has come to be treated as virtually synonymous with "American philosophy."Pragmatism is often misunderstood, in large part because we tend to use the word "pragmatism" to mean practical-mindedness or expediency. Well, Pragmatism can certainly be seen as a practical-minded or expedient approach to doing philosophy, but it is important to keep in mind that Pragmatism (at least in the philosophical sense of the word) is specifically an approach to doing philosophy—it is not really about practical-mindedness or expediency in everyday affairs. In other words, the goal of Pragmatist philosophers is not to preach the virtues of practical living; it is to do philosophy in a particular way. (Here, I am using the word "philosophy" in a fairly broad sense to mean the serious, reasoned contemplation of ideas and their implications; so this would include not only the academic discipline of philosophy, but most other fields of scholarship as well, plus at least a few professions outside of academia, the most notable being the field of law.) Pragmatism is about taking a particular approach to the contemplation of ideas—an approach that Pragmatists consider to be more practical-minded than most of the alternative approaches that have been tried over the centuries.William James, in his famous series of lectures on Pragmatism in 1906-07 (which he later published in book form), illustrated the Pragmatist approach to thinking with this amusing anecdote:"Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: 'Which party is right,' I said, 'depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by "going round" the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb "to go round" in one practical fashion or the other.' "While this anecdote cleverly illustrates the sort of practical-minded approach that Pragmatists like to take when thinking about ideas (in this case, the rather trivial idea of what it means "to go round" a squirrel), this illustration only scratches the surface of what philosophical Pragmatism is all about, and you'll need to do quite a bit of reading on the subject (or take a course in American philosophy) in order to fully understand how Pragmatists do philosophy.'The Metaphysical Club' is actually a pretty good place to begin. It won't teach you everything you need to know about the subject, but it will give you a pretty good sense of what Pragmatism is all about. More importantly, you will learn a great deal about how Pragmatism came to be. You will learn about the men and women who contributed, directly or indirectly, to its development—in particular, about the four men who are most directly responsible for bringing us Pragmatism: Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. You'll learn about how their lives and experiences—and the most important and controversial issues of their day—helped shape their ways of thinking. You'll learn about how the history of Pragmatism is connected to the troubled history of race relations in America as well as to the growing tension between science and religion that could be seen in the decades after the publication of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'. Understanding the historical context and intellectual climate in which Pragmatism developed will give you a better sense of what Pragmatism is really all about.But this book is about so much more than just Pragmatism. Likewise, it is about so much more than just the lives and the intellectual accomplishments of Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey—who are arguably the four most important American thinkers of the period between the end of the Civil War the end of World War I (and in the case of Holmes and Dewey, well after the end of World War I). Yes, it is a biography of these four men and the idea they gave birth to. It is also, to a lesser extent, a biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (the father of Justice Holmes), Henry James, Sr. (the father of William James—whose brother was the famous novelist Henry James), and Benjamin Peirce (the father of Charles Peirce), all of whom were well-known and highly-respected (if a bit eccentric) intellectuals of their day who had a great deal of influence on the intellectual development of their respective sons. (John Dewey's father, Archibald, on the other hand, was a storekeeper—a fairly intelligent and well-read man, it seems, but not a scholar or a public figure like Holmes, James, and Peirce, Srs. The book devotes only a few sentences to him.) And the book also includes brief biographical sketches of many other people who influenced the development of Pragmatism in some meaningful way, including a number whose main contribution was simply to argue in favor of views that the Pragmatists ultimately rejected. But this book is also, as its subtitle, 'A Story of Ideas in America,' suggests, a biography of America itself, or at least a chapter in that biography. It is the story of how the Civil War and its aftermath changed America—in particular, how it changed the way American intellectuals think about big ideas.But it's even more than that. There are so many delightful treats in this book that it would be impossible for me to list them all. The author frequently goes off on what at first appear to be random tangents about topics ranging from the whaling industry to the Pullman strike to Laplace's and Maxwell's demons to legal battles over who gets to hire and fire professors at a university to how statistical analysis can be used to detect a forged signature on a will, but he always manages to tie all of these odd digressions back to the story of how ideas in America evolved in the decades after the Civil War, ultimately leading to the development of Pragmatism. The journey that the author takes us on has lots of twists, turns, and detours, but it is fascinating and fun—not to mention educational. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of the various ideas about race and race relations that were being debated both before and after the Civil War. You may be surprised at some of the things you learn. (People held some pretty bizarre and appalling ideas about race in those days. Of course, most white Americans back then—on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—were horribly racist by today's standards, and that includes a number of Abolitionists! But the sheer variety of views on race and race relations that were seriously proposed, discussed, and debated in those days is staggering. In the decades after the Civil War, many black intellectuals began to make their own contributions to this discussion. These included scholars such as W.E.B. du Bois, who had studied philosophy under William James, and Alain Locke, who was also influenced by the Pragmatist tradition. They are also discussed in this book.)If you are interested in philosophy, American history (particularly the history of the Civil War and its aftermath), or the history of ideas, I highly recommend this book. I guarantee you will learn something interesting, and you'll probably enjoy it, too.
The Overture:Louis Menand provides us with a delightful ride through American intellectual history while showing us that the evolution and development of American intellectual life was anything but smooth. It was full of contradictions and setbacks, as well as leaps forward, characterized by both progress and reversion. America was, and still is, characterized by a strange admixture of Christian fundamentalism, laissez-faire economics principles, national isolationism, a paternalistic tendency to evangelist its values, the doctrine of natural law, scientific determinism, personal free will, the validity of natural Darwinism, creation theory and the fallacy social Darwinism. In this book, Louis Menand puts forward a lucid and cogent case for the reconsideration of American pragmatism. In a world and a country of increasing vitriolic political division based on dearly held beliefs that do not allow for the possibility of error, a dose of good old American pragmatism might be in order. Anything that makes it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs is to be welcome.The Pragmatic Summary:William James:C.S. Peirce, the founder of what we now know as pragmatism by which he meant, in simple terms, that what makes a statement true is the empirical verifiability of the statement as a result competent inquiry. William James meant that a statement is true if it works. To put it crudely, truth is what works and promotes wellbeing. More fully, James held that ideas precede truth. That is, “truth happens to an ideaâ€. An Idea becomes a truth based on subsequent consequences and outcomes, ideas do not start as being ‘true’. This is how James explained that science and belief in God are compatible, including belief in free will, we develop beliefs that are useful and work in terms of navigating our personal existence and social experience. Beliefs work in the service of interests. Each is only a hypothesis and is changeable as experience unfolds. As James said, no belief is justified by its correspondence to ‘reality’ because mirroring the ‘reality’ is not the purpose of the human mind. We do not act because we have beliefs, we have beliefs because we act, the two then become commingled and inseparable. In the view of Peirce, what started as an instrument leading to ever expanding knowledge of the natural world became instead, in the hands of James, a tool for justifying belief in whatever one is deeply committed to believing. When Peirce learned what James had made of pragmatism he changed the name employed to label his thinking to “pragmaticismâ€, an intentionally awkward term to prevent its use and misuse. In any case, James did not much like the term pragmatism either, he preferred ‘humanism’ to describe what was going on in Peirce’s thought as well as his own.C.S. Peirce:In Peirce’s thought, ‘truth’ is the opinion upon which all competent investigations will converge based on rational scientific inquiries, opining will lead to convergence - this is as concise a summary of the view of Charles Sanders Peirce that I can manage. This to me means that there is an evolutionary learning process at the base of that which we call ‘truth’. We gain a sufficiency of understanding through experience, not a totality of understanding. What counts as evidence, methods of gathering evidence, and thus what counts as ‘truth’ changes over time. It is evolutionary and progressive in manner. Knowledge, ‘truth’, is just the outcome of competent examination of an issue subject to changing circumstances and competing values. What is ‘true’ is only derived at the end of a process of inquiry, not at the beginning. However, we proceed in the opposite manner, often believing that the ‘truth’ of the matter is arrived at first. For Peirce, the principle by which the ‘truth’ is established and understood occurs only after the fact. This does not mean that such principles are arbitrary or capricious, only that they are established, and modified, as a result of repeated and competent inquiry. The deeper implication is that our thinking is circular. That is, there is no appeal outside of our thinking to validate our thinking but the habitual activity resulting from the process inquiring and thinking can be statistically modeled, suggesting convergence around a mean which is an important part what Peirce meant with his “pragmaticismâ€. We only have a belief about beliefs because mental representations do not refer to things in the world, they refer to other metal representations. The less metaphysical are our beliefs, the more useful they will be for navigating the world.John Dewey:John Dewey preferred to call what became known as pragmatism, he did not like the label any more than did Peirce or James, as ‘instrumentalism’ by which he meant that ‘truth’ is what we are warranted in saying is true; ‘truth’ is just what is warrantably assertible and this found through the experience of doing and testing things in the world. Pragmatism provides an account of the way people navigate their experience of existence, the way they think, come up with ideas, form beliefs and reach decisions. That is, in the navigation of our experience, thinking and acting are two names for this single process of navigation. For Dewey, much like James, beliefs are merely tools. If a belief or set of beliefs do not work in the world, we simply disregard then an adopt new beliefs that do work, better at least, for now at least. There is no metaphysical privileging of the mind and ideas over any other aspect of the environment. The relation of the mind to ‘reality’ is no different than relation of hand to the environment. Good decisions are congruent with the social world. Ethics is social, not personal. As John Dewey stated, it is not the individual that makes the society, it is the society that make the individual. His idea of society was one based on tolerance and equality.Oliver Wendell Holmes:Oliver Wendell Holes would characterize all this quite succinctly in stating that a free trade in ideas is far superior to the best devised test of ‘truth’. But Homes realized that there are always defects in free trade and market transactions that prevent them from being completely free or perfectly competitive. This is an experimental process but life itself is an experiment and Homes crucially understood that explements can fail. ‘Truth’ is not correspondence to a preexisting ideology or metaphysical ‘reality’, it is simply that which produces a difference for the civil society. In the view Holmes, individual rights such as free speech are protected, not because the rights inhere to the individual, but because such rights benefit the community; to find the best possible ‘truth’ - to produce the optimal outcomes for the society. Free speech is not an individual good, it is a social good.Criticisms of Pragmatism:What is important and common to the four leading thinkers of pragmatism is that it does not provide a fixed philosophical system like so much of nineteenth century and prior thinking. There are no conclusions, just a continued unfolding. It was certainly not a revolutionary philosophy. However, pragmatism does not address from where or how we get our ideas and interests and why some people are prepared to die, and kill others, for what is just a contingent working hypothesis. Pragmatism provides no criteria by which to judge the ‘truths’ that result from pragmatism, not even the crudest of utilitarian criteria is suggested. Are these pragmatic ‘truths’ the same as values? Is this how values are created under a pragmatic regime? Is anything that achieves its end to be regarded as valuable? Is this what is meant by value?The Pragmatic Truth:What follows from pragmatism is that ‘truth’ is to be found in processes and procedures, not in principles and premises. If the legal or scientific procedures are correct for example, the outcomes will be beneficial science and law. Beneficial science and law do not follow from preexisting ideas, truths or metaphysical systems no matter how cherished or traditional. The same is true education, If the procedures and process of education are good, the education will be good.The Poor Print Quality of the Book:As enthusiast of paper and ink, I found both to be of inferior quality in this printing. The print itself is faint and in places letters are poorly struck or altogether missing. This resulting in words that are incomplete, e.g., p 195, to wit: “individual†is rendered as “ dividual’ and “ a machine†is rendered as “ achineâ€. On p. 155, the word “we†is missing, perhaps more an example of poor editing. On p. 332, the word “waste†is rendered as “ aste†with a poorly struck â€aâ€. None of this is reflection upon the author or the book as a literary work, both of which are excellent.
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