I've said it before: If I could have dinner with one historical figure, it would be William James. The first argument in Pragmatism is that people choose a philosophy based on their temperament, and James' temperament (and ergo his philosophy) largely matches mine. Also his prose is clear and enjoyable -- at least in works written after 1904; the articles from the 19th century collected in The Meaning of Truth fall short in both departments.
The back cover promotes Pragmatism as "the most famous single work of American philosophy." Like James' masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, it derives from a series of lectures. He seeks to define the nature of the doctrine and show how it provides a middle way between the dogmatic views of idealists and empiricists. He hopes to defuse some fundamental disagreements between them.
I gained new perspective on several points despite being well acquainted with pragmatism and with William James. I see more clearly how the pragmatic method relates to James' view of evolving reality and how he defines 'truth' as a relation whose details differ in each concrete case. One insight that stands out is a new understanding of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy:
The back cover promotes Pragmatism as "the most famous single work of American philosophy." Like James' masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, it derives from a series of lectures. He seeks to define the nature of the doctrine and show how it provides a middle way between the dogmatic views of idealists and empiricists. He hopes to defuse some fundamental disagreements between them.
I gained new perspective on several points despite being well acquainted with pragmatism and with William James. I see more clearly how the pragmatic method relates to James' view of evolving reality and how he defines 'truth' as a relation whose details differ in each concrete case. One insight that stands out is a new understanding of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy:
So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God...sends you the sensible world directly... (p 47)James is not the most rigorous of thinkers, and so the book suffers when he tackles abstruse philosophical disputes. His prose becomes less clear and gains an edge of defensiveness. This happens more frequently in The Meaning of Truth, which unlike the Pragmatism lectures is targeted at professional philosophers. The Meaning of Truth acts like a set of detailed footnotes or essays in a Norton critical edition.
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