Pragmatism is somewhat the same; that is, it’s the idea that there’s an openness and a flexibility to experience which is gained by getting rid of the notion that there is some sort of absolute ideal reality out there that we have to check against all the time.
Louis Menand and Mona Simpson discuss their writing in acceptance of the Chicago Tribune’s annual prize for work “embodying the spirit of the nation’s heartland.” Menand contextualizes the role of pragmatism in American history in regard to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001). He relates that philosophy’s birth through the lives of such thinkers as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., John Dewey, and William James, Jane Addams, and Charles Sanders Peirce. In exploring both the personal and professional lives of his subjects, Menand illuminates the connection between the trauma of the Civil War and the practical, relatively non-dogmatic approach to philosophy and science that arose in the following years.
Meanwhile, Simpson muses on the contemporary writer’s life after the publication of her novel Off Keck Road (2001), an understated but unflinching portrait of a young woman who goes home to care for her mother in small-town Wisconsin and decides to stay.
Stylish, thoughtful, and bursting with insight, relative newcomer Emily Raboteau accepts the Tribune’s Nelson Algren Short Story Award for her story “Bernie and Me.”
Above: The Illinois National Guard grads the Arcade Building against Pullman strikers during the Pullman Railroad Strike in 1894. Photograph courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project.
Tags
Pragmatism,
philosophy,
metaphysics,
contemporary literature,
fiction,
nonfiction,
short stories,
American history,
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,
John Dewey,
Jane Addams,
Charles Sanders Peirce,
Jonathan Franzen,
Louis Menand,
Mona Simpson,
Emily Raboteau,
Yaddo