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The Truth is What Works: William James, Pragmatism, and the Seed of Death: William James, Pragmatisim and the Seed of Death
Author(s): Harvey Cormier (Author)
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
- Publication Date: 1 Dec. 2000
- Language: English
- Print length: 176 pages
- ISBN-10: 0847692728
- ISBN-13: 9780847692729
Book Description
Charles Sanders Peirce complained that James allowed pragmatism to become “infected” with “seeds of death” like the idea that truth is mutable. The Truth is What Works is an attempt to defend James’s pragmatic theory of truth from a wide range of critics including Peirce, Betrand Russell, Hilary Putnam, and Cornel West. Cormier runs the gauntlet of historical and contemporary criticism in an attempt to show, not that Jamesian pragmatism does in fact contain a perfectly good theory of objective reality after all, but rather that it doesn’t, and is still a kind of realism anyway because it does not leave individuals and their subjective desires behind in an attempt to describe the real world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Corimer has a good grasp of James’ views, and ranges widely over his oeuvre in making his case. — Matthew Stephens, University of Alberta
About the Author
Harvey Cormier is assistant professor of philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook.
