Pragmatism

3 units

The focus of this course is the classical pragmatist movement, a cluster of then highly controversial ideas developed from the 1870s through the 1940s by Peirce, James, Dewey, Meade and C. I. Lewis. Widely regarded as the distinctively American contribution to the history of philosophy, it has been profoundly influential in shaping much subsequent American philosophical theory, especially the work of recent and contemporary analytically oriented philosophers. We'll concentrate on classical pragmatism in the writings of its early proponents, but pay some attention also to the prominence of pragmatistic elements in the thought of Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Putnam, and Goodman.