THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB

'The Metaphysical Club' was a philosophical club that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., psychologist William James, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce formed in January of 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The Metaphysical Club," didn't—as did the idea of metaphysics itself in the minds of these dominant thinkers—last long.
''The Metaphysical Club'' is also 2001 a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book by Louis Menand about these men. While it ventures into many different directions, covering topics in American history, notable pioneers of American higher education and philosophy, it mainly concerns the erosion of metaphysics and its eventual replacement by pragmatism as a dominant force in shaping American philosophy and its conception of ideas. The book follows the three aforementioned giants of American intellectual thought, plus educator/philosopher John Dewey. Menand traces the biography of each of these individuals, connecting them in places and showing how all were in a sense influenced by their times and by thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Holmes, the Civil War destroyed his entire perspective on the world and greatly shaped his judicial philosophy, which, later on, emerged at roughly the same time as Dewey, James and Peirce were beginning to develop pragmatist ideas.

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Publication data

Publication data

★ ''The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America'' (2001), New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-19963-9 (hardcover), ISBN 0-374-52849-7 (paperback)