Gestures in the Making

More than a century ago, reviewing the raging controversy over pragmatism, Jean Bourdeau wrote that “Pragmatism is an Anglo-Saxon reaction against the intellectualism and rationalism of the Latin mind […] It is a philosophy without words, a philosophy of gestures and of acts, which abandons what is general and holds only to what is particular” (Trans. William James, W:MT, 113). Bourdeau certainly missed the point of the first pragmatist revolution, but it can also be argued that, ironically, ..