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Book Cover
Book
Author Menand, Louis

Title The Metaphysical Club / Louis Menand
Edition 1st pbk. ed
Published New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, ©2001

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  973.9 Men/Mcl  AVAILABLE
Description xii, 546 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Contents Politics of slavery -- Abolitionist -- Wilderness and after -- Man of two minds -- Agassiz -- Brazil -- Peirces -- Law of errors -- Metaphysical club -- Burlington -- Baltimore -- Chicago -- Pragmatisms -- Pluralisms -- Freedoms -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index
Summary Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History a riveting, original 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 depend -- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea 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
Notes Reprint. Originally published: ©2001
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 499-520) and index
Notes Pulitzer Prize in History, 2002
Francis Parkman Prize, 2002
Subject Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 1841-1935
James, William, 1842-1910
Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914
Dewey, John, 1859-1952
Metaphysics -- History -- 20th century
National characteristics, American
Intellectuals -- United States -- History -- 20th century
SUBJECT United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
United States -- Social conditions -- 20th century
Cambridge (Mass.) -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
Genre/Form History.
ISBN 0374528497
9780374528492