Description
Book SynopsisCharles 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.
Trade ReviewCorimer has a good grasp of James' views, and ranges widely over his oeuvre in making his case. -- Matthew Stephens, University of Alberta
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction: Pragmatism and the Real Chapter 2 A Genealogy of Truth; or, Twilight of the Idle Chapter 3 James, Peirce, and the Seed of Death Chapter 4 Pragmatism and Scepticism; or, the Pragmatist Keeps on Searching Chapter 5 The Ideal Becomes the Real: Pragmatism and "Empirical Realism" Chapter 6 The One and the Many: Gramsci and Cornel West on James
