Americans today are in a paradoxical place: we are prepared to defend, even to die for, the belief that no one should ever be made to die because of a belief.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 1, 2001.
Historian, literary scholar, and New Yorker writer Louis Menand talks about The Metaphysical Club, his bestselling book on the first pragmatists—Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, moral philosopher William James, and scientist Charles S. Peirce—whose ideas are now more relevant than ever. Describing pragmatism as the American effort to come to terms with modernity, he discusses the role of pragmatism in the months immediately following September 11, 2001.
Above: Detail from the cover of the second and final issue of Blast magazine, July 1915. Woodcut print by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957).
Tags
Chicago,
Pragmatism,
Philosophical Systems,
Intellectual History,
William James,
John Dewey,
Darwin,
Modernity,
Civil War,
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr.,
Chicago,
Jane Addams,
Democracy
