Introduction: Pragmatism Then and Now

Abstract

The revival of pragmatism has excited enormous interest and controversy in the intellectual community over the past two decades. By the middle of the twentieth century, pragmatism was widely considered a naively optimistic residue ofan earlier liberalism, discredited by the Depression and the horrors of the war, and virtually driven from philosophy departments by the reigning school of analytic philosophy. Now once again it is recognized not only as the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy but as a new way of approaching old problems in a number of fields. As the present volume shows, pragmatism has become a key point of reference around which contemporary debates in social thought, law, and literary theory as well as philosophy have been unfolded. It has appealed to philosophers moving beyond analytic philosophy, European theorists looking for an alternative to Marxism, and postmodernists seeking native roots for their critique of absolutes and universals. The revival has not only drawn new attention to the original pragmatists but altered our view of writers as different as Emerson and Frost, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Santayana and Stevens, Du Bois and Ellison, all ofwhom have been reconsidered in the light of a broader conception of pragmatist thinking. Pragmatism as a branch of philosophy is exactly a hundred years old. The term was first brought forward by William James in a lecture in Berkeley in 1898, published as "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." In developing pragmatism as a critique ofabstractions and absolutes and as a philosophy oriented toward practice and action, James insisted that he was only building on thoughts developed by his friend Charles Sanders Peirce in Cambridge more than twenty years earlier. But the cantankerous Peirce was far from pleased with what James did with his ideas. Pragmatism's early years were as filled with controversy as its recent career. James plunged into the fray with his usual zest, and the lectures published as Pragmatism in 1907 became one of his most widely read