The Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club PDF Author: Louis Menand
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706387
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Get Book

Book Description
The Metaphysical Club is the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. A national bestseller and "hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant" (Janet Maslin, New York Times) book about the creation of modern American thought. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent -- like knives and forks and microchips -- to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent-- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life.

The Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club PDF Author: Louis Menand
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706387
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Get Book

Book Description
The Metaphysical Club is the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. A national bestseller and "hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant" (Janet Maslin, New York Times) book about the creation of modern American thought. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent -- like knives and forks and microchips -- to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent-- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life.

The Real Metaphysical Club

The Real Metaphysical Club PDF Author: Frank X. Ryan
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438473265
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book

Book Description
A full account of the Metaphysical Club, featuring the members’ philosophical writings and four critical essays. The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America’s distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand’s bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James—appear in the book, alongside other thinkers who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains the important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors’ three introductions to the volume’s sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought of the Metaphysical Club. Frank X. Ryan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University and the author of Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley. Brian E. Butler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Asheville and the author of The Democratic Constitution: Experimentalism and Interpretation. James A. Good is Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business, and Economics Division at Lone Star College-North Harris. He is the coeditor (with John R. Shook) of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel.

The Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club PDF Author: Louis Menand
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007126905
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Get Book

Book Description
The Metaphysical Club was a group that met in Massachusetts, in 1872. The group believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent to make their way in the world. This book is the story of that idea.

The Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club PDF Author: Louis Menand
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374528497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Get Book

Book Description
A narrative about personalities and American history is told through the story of an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872 to talk about ideas.

The Real Metaphysical Club

The Real Metaphysical Club PDF Author: Frank X. Ryan
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438473257
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book

Book Description
A full account of the Metaphysical Club, featuring the members’ philosophical writings and four critical essays. The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America’s distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand’s bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James—appear in the book, alongside other thinkers who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains the important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors’ three introductions to the volume’s sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought of the Metaphysical Club. “The Real Metaphysical Club includes some very important thinkers that don’t always make it into anthologies of American philosophy. The period is also important. 1870 to 1885 is critical to the development of classical American philosophy. It precedes it and sets its direction. The book accomplishes its goal of giving the reader a sense of the period by arranging the works in a very interesting way. The readings and introduction are very readable and would be helpful to both graduate and undergraduate students as well as general readers interested in American Thought.” — James M. McLachlan, Western Carolina University

The Free World

The Free World PDF Author: Louis Menand
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374722919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 880

Get Book

Book Description
"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

Discovering Modernism

Discovering Modernism PDF Author: Louis Menand
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199774714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
When Discovering Modernism was first published, it shed new and welcome light on the birth of Modernism. This reissue of Menand's classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot's career as a poet and critic. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand's critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism. Menand shows how Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity, and his later repudiation of those views, reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. It will prove an eye-opening study for readers with an interest in the writings of T.S. Eliot and other luminaries of the Modernist era.

Metaphysical Community

Metaphysical Community PDF Author: Greg Urban
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292785298
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
Review: "Leading exponent of discourse-centered approach examines social organization of the Shokleng, Gê-speaking peoples of southern Brazil. Author suggests a reading in terms of the problematic of knowledge: the theme of intelligibility and sensibility and their interrelations; logical empiricism and its connection to the world; the attachment of circulating discourse to sensible space; the relation of discourse and power relations; and the relation of discourse to reference"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. http://www.loc.gov/hlas/

Genealogical Pragmatism

Genealogical Pragmatism PDF Author: John J. Stuhr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438421540
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
Drawing on the work of popular American writers, American philosophers, and Continental thinkers, this book provides a new interpretation of pragmatism and American philosophy.

Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945

Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945 PDF Author: Malachi Haim Hacohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521890557
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 628

Get Book

Book Description
This 2001 biography reassesses philosopher Karl Popper's life and works within the context of interwar Vienna.