The Metaphysical Club

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For the book, see The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.

The Metaphysical Club was a conversational philosophical club that the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the philosopher and psychologist William James, and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce formed in January 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dissolved in December 1872. Upon Peirce's arrival at Johns Hopkins University in 1879, he founded a new Metaphysical Club there.

The name of the club was chosen "half-ironically, half-defiantly,"[1] according to Peirce, as the group rejected the radical foundationalist European metaphysics in favor of a moderate foundationalism, pursued critical thinking of a pragmatist and positivist nature.[2] In fact, it was within these philosophical discussions that pragmatism is said to have been born.[3]

Other members of the club included Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Nicholas St. John Green, and .[4] The Metaphysical Club is never mentioned by any person within the club other than Peirce. The only other known person to have mentioned the club was Henry James, the great novelist and brother of William James.[5]

References[]

  1. ^ Peirce, Charles (1960). Buchler, Justus (ed.). The Philosophy of Peirce, Selected Writings. Harcourt, Brace and Company. p. 269.
  2. ^ Menand, Louis. 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) p. 226, 274.
  3. ^ Peirce, C. S. (1929), "The Founding of Pragmatism", The Hound and Horn: A Harvard Miscellany v. II, n. 3, April–June, pp. 282–5 (see 283–4). Reprinted as "Historical Affinities and Genesis" in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, v. 5, paragraphs 11–13 (see 12–13), dated by the editors as circa 1906. Also see Shook, John R. (undated), "The Metaphysical Club Archived 2009-01-26 at the Wayback Machine" at the Pragmatism Cybrary.
  4. ^ Menand (2001), p. 201.
  5. ^ STROUSE, JEAN (June 10, 2001). "Where They Got Their Ideas". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2022-03-10.

External links[]

  • Shook, John R. (undated), "The Metaphysical Club" at the Pragmatism Cybrary. Includes an account of the Club and individualized accounts of Chauncey Wright, Nicholas St. John Green, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Joseph Bangs Warner, along with bibliographies, complete ones in the cases of Wright and Green.
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