
William James
Pragmatism asks
its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what
concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth
be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the
belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
--Pragmatism (1907)
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William James

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What is
Pragmatism?
Pragmatism
is a major movement
of American Philosophy, which started in the 1870s
with the
Metaphysical Club.
Pragmatists have impacted politics, law, education, religion, and every
academic discipline.
Pragmatism is closely aligned with
Naturalism and
Humanism. Read introductions to pragmatism and pragmatists in
the Web
Companion to Pragmatism. Also read a survey of the History of
Pragmatism.
Who are
Pragmatists?
Locate
scholars around the world whose interests include pragmatism.
The Library
of Living Pragmatists lists
dozens of major contemporary pragmatists. Read
autobiographical statements by scholars about
Falling in Love with Pragmatism. Visit
The
Genealogy Center for the major
schools of pragmatism (Cambridge, Chicago, Columbia) and their branches.
Where do
Pragmatists
Come From?
Nearly 300 scholars are included in the Cybrary's lists of
philosophy professors whose
research and teaching interests include pragmatism. Where did they come
from? Which doctoral programs turn out graduates who learned about
pragmatism and maintained that interest in their careers? The Pragmatism
Cybrary won't rate PhD programs for quality or job placement, but these
numbers let you draw your own conclusions. The Cybrarian only notes that
most of these programs have turned out pragmatists for generations.
Reactions? Contact
the Cybrarian.
Columbia University, 19
Fordham University, 14
Southern Illinois University, 13
Vanderbilt University, 12
Pennsylvania State University, 11
University of Chicago, 11
Saint Louis University, 10
SUNY at Stony Brook, 10
University of Notre Dame, 10
Yale University, 10
Boston University, 9
Harvard University, 9
Princeton University, 8
University of Pennsylvania, 8
Emory University, 7
Purdue University, 6
University of Texas, 6
Boston College, 5
Claremont Graduate University, 5
Loyola University, Chicago, 5
University of Miami, 5
University of Oregon, 5
City University of New York, 4
Tulane University, 4
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4
University of Michigan, 4
University of Western Ontario, 4 |
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pragblog
The death of Peter
Hare on January 3 has saddened all friends of American philosophy.
Visit the Cybrary's page...
The New York
Pragmatist Forum has announced its Spring 2008 speakers.
See the
announcement...
The Midwest
Pragmatist Forum has announced its September 2008 meeting.
See the
announcement...
The Eclipse of Pragmatism?
There has been much talk of pragmatism's
"eclipse" during analytic philosophy's greatest dominance from 1950 to
1990. Your cybrarian's own view is that pragmatism was
never eclipsed. Quite marginalized in the 1920s and 1930s,
pragmatist professors such as Dewey at Columbia and Mead at Chicago
encouraged many young
pragmatists to go into sociology, anthropology, linguistics,
psychology, education, and economics. Many of the best new minds
favorable towards pragmatism strongly influenced the
social sciences during the 1940s - 1980s.
In philosophy departments, pragmatism remained marginalized. However, Harvard and
Columbia remained quite pragmatic and carried on the debate.
For example, C.I. Lewis, Morton White, and W.V. Quine at Harvard, along with Ernest Nagel, Signey Morgenbesser, and Isaac Levi at Columbia,
each pursued some pragmatist themes. Many of their students have in turn defended
selected pragmatist views, much diluted and transformed, but still
consistent with pragmatic naturalism (eg. views seen in
Putnam, Davidson, Dennett, Churchland, etc). Supplemented by the efforts of renegade analytic philosophers such as Richard Rorty, pragmatism remained marginalized,
yet very potent and defended by a few major figures at prominent philosophy departments. Visit The
Genealogy Center for details. When philosophy became more interdisciplinary in the
1990s, its encounters with linguistics, anthropology, cognitive
science, semiotics, etc., brought it back into
contact with flourishing pragmatist views.
In summary, pragmatism has been a small but potent philosophy before and after WW II.
IIts contemporary vitality is enhanced by philosophy's re-engagement with the social and cognitive sciences.
Reactions? Contact
the Cybrarian.
Spotlight:
Pragmatism in Philosophy
of Mind
Pragmatism was the original functional psychology and cognitive
science that (1) explains intelligence in terms of deliberate purposive
conduct, and (2) explains knowledge as successful predictions about
manipulating nature. Experience and mind are not limited to, or
reducible to, brain events -- experience, mind, and the like are
evolving natural systems of organism-environment transactions.
Your cybrarian reads defenses of some or all of these principles in the recent works
of:
Andy Clark
(Edinburgh, UK)
Susan Hurley (Bristol, UK)
Alva Noë (UC Berkeley,
USA)
Mark Rowlands
(Hertfordshire, UK)
Robert Wilson (Alberta,
CAN)
Teed Rockwell (Sonoma,
USA)
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DON'T MISS!
Summer Institute in American Philosophy
7-12 July 2008
University of Colorado, Boulder
CALL
FOR PAPERS on PAUL KURTZ
Contemporary
Pragmatism
![]()
New Books
Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric
Robert Danish
U. South Carolina Press, 2007
New Pragmatists
ed. Cheryl Misak
Oxford UP, 2007
A Companion to Pragmatism
eds. John Shook and Joseph MargolisBlackwell, 2006
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