Pragmatism Old & New: Selected Writings

Asking what we can learn from the older pragmatist tradition, and what we can salvage from the intellectual shipwreck of the new, Susan Haack, with the assistance of Robert Lane, has put together a wide-ranging anthology that tells the story of the evolution of pragmatism from its origins in C. S. Peirce’s hopes of making philosophy more scientific and William James’s of unstiffening our theories, to the radical literary-political neo-pragmatism recently popularized by Richard Rorty. Opening with a history of pragmatism from its inception to the present day, and closing with Haack’s famous interview with Peirce and Rorty, the book presents a broad and diverse selection of pragmatist writings — classical and contemporary, reformist and revolutionary — on logic, metaphysics, theory of inquiry, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and moral, social, and political philosophy