The American Pragmatists (The Oxford History of Philosophy) - Hardcover

In casting Peirce and Lewis as the heroes of American Pragmatism, with James and Dewey as the villains, Misak establishes an impressive continuity between pragmatism and both logical empiricism and contemporary analytic philosophy... Indeed, the main arc that Cheryl Misak traces - from Kant, through Peirce and Lewis, and then on to W. V. Quine and into wider philosophical orthodoxy - deserves to become widely known. (Tim Button, The Times Literary Supplement)

This book deserves to become a new standard for understanding the history of philosophical pragmatism; no other work covers such a diverse range of essential pragmatists together in such a short space, accurately and thoughtfully placing them in context with one another and with tradition as a whole ... Essential. (S.E. Forschler, CHOICE)

Cheryl Misak presents a history of the great American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, from its inception in the Metaphysical Club of the 1870s to the present day. She identifies two dominant lines of thought in the tradition: the first begins with Charles S. Peirce and Chauncey Wright and continues through to Lewis, Quine, and Sellars; the other begins with William James and continues through to Dewey and Rorty. This ambitious new account identifies the connections between traditional American pragmatism and twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy, and links pragmatism to major positions in the recent history of philosophy, such as logical empiricism. Misak argues that the most defensible version of pragmatism must be seen and recovered as an important part of the analytic tradition.