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Article: The Metaphysical Club. (BookTalk: principle over pragmatism).
- Article from:
- The American Enterprise
- Article date:
- January 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The American Enterprise, a national magazine of politics, business and culture (TEAmag.com). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Metaphysical Club By Louis Menand Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 546 pages, $27
The Metaphysical Club is an intellectual history of the lives and thoughts of the individuals who comprised the late-nineteenth-century intellectual movement known as pragmatism, a forerunner of modern liberalism. The original Metaphysical Club was a group of talented young men of distinguished lineage, with the benefits of a Harvard education, who met regularly to hold philosophical discussions. The most noteworthy among them were C. S. Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The club's name was ironic; the discussions were resolutely agnostic and anti-metaphysical. The ...