The Metaphysical Club / Louis Menand.
Menand, Louis.
2002
E169.1 .M546 2002 (Mapit)
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Title The Metaphysical Club / Louis Menand.
Author Menand, Louis.
Edition 1st pbk. ed.
ISBN 9780374528492 (pbk.)
0374528497 (pbk.)
Publication Details New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, c2001.
Language English
Description xii, 546 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.
Call Number E169.1 .M546 2002
Dewey Decimal Classification 973.9
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 Well 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.
Note Reprint. Originally published: c2001.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (p. 499-520) and index.
Awards Pulitzer Prize, 2002
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
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.

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