A concise, reader-friendly overview of pragmatism, the most influential school of American philosophical thought.
Pragmatism, America’s homegrown philosophy, has been a major intellectual movement for over a century. Unlike its rivals, it reaches well beyond the confines of philosophy into concerns and disciplines as diverse as religion, politics, science, and culture. In this concise, engagingly written overview, John R. Shook describes pragmatism’s origins, concepts, and continuing global relevance and appeal. With attention to the movement’s original thinkers—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead—as well as its contemporary proponents, he explains how pragmatism thinks about what is real, what can be known, and what minds are doing. And because of pragmatism’s far-reaching impact, Shook shows how its views on reality, truth, knowledge, and cognition coordinate with its approaches to agency, sociality, human nature, and personhood.
Series Overview: ACCESSIBLE, CONCISE, BEAUTIFULLY PRODUCED BOOKS ON TOPICS OF CURRENT INTEREST. Written by leading thinkers, this series delivers expert overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical. Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access to complex ideas.
