Product Description

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., founder of modern jurisprudence; 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 dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1032041 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Review
Daniel Kevles, Yale University : ". . . Menand's book is an extraordinary collective biography, at once erudite and enthralling." Joan Didion: "The Metaphysical Club is brilliant, illuminating, necessary." Henry Louis Gates, Jr: "The Metaphysical Club makes a genuinely original contribution to our national self-understanding... as evocative, and precise, as a Luminist painting." Richard Poirier: "This is a richly populated, intellectually thrilling book in which America is shown to be discovering its future."

About the Author
Louis Menand is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and has been a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books since 1994. This is his first book for a general readership.

Customer Reviews

The history of an idea
The Metaphysical Club traces the emergence of the philosophical idea of pragmatism, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Pragmatism is an idea about ideas: that ideas are socially developed tools, that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. In that sense ideas are not out there waiting to be discovered, but depend on humans and the environment they find themselves in.

The author traces the development of the concept through the biographies of four key intellectuals - Charles Pierce, William James, John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes - and a collection of other characters, who corresponded, debated and whose work intersected. He shows how the ideas emerged naturally out of the aftermath of the civil war as the intellectual culture of the States readjusted itself. The four figures he focuses on worked in very different fields (jurisprudence, psychology, logic and education) and this makes for a very wide-ranging book.

By taking a biographical approach, the author avoids a dry intellectual work, and brings his subject alive. Menaud has a gift for clear explanation and simplifying (without reducing) philosophical concepts. The anecdotes and examples he uses to tell his story (the court case of Hetty Robinson, showing how probability theory started being used in evidence, for example) are well-chosen, well-told and illustrate the development of a philosophy which roots itself in its social context. He also analyses the faults in the philosophical theory, and the problems that later philosophers found with it, which led to its loss in intellectual currency.

This book would be enjoyed by a wider audience than just those interested in philosophy - it is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys both biography and history.

astonishingly broad and accessible work of scholarship
This is an intellectual history on an epic scale. Beginning in antebellum Boston, Menand takes the reader through the Civil War as an epochal event in the most human of ways - as reflected in lived human experience; and thereby he makes a crucial connection. Americans knew what certainty could lead to. Oliver Wendell Holmes came to think as he did, as a jurist and a philosopher, because he had seen what beliefs can do to people when they are believed in certain ways and for certain reasons. Tracing and retracing a considerable number of historical and biographical strands, Menand narrates the emergence of pragmatism from the intellectual currents of nineteenth-century American thought, but also from its morphing and diversifying culture and its complex social history. At the same time he makes it clear that pragmatism held no claim to be THE American philosophy, and that it was no inevitable outcome of the intellectual, cultural and social forces which shaped it. It was the product of the intellectual work and the response to the intellectual climate of their time, of a collection of unique human beings.

That said, the most staggering thing for me, reflecting a hole in my knowledge that this book did a huge amount to fill, was the reflection that America has been postmodernizing for a lot longer than I had ever imagined.

And all of this from an exceedingly READABLE book.