The Foundations of Pragmatism in American Thought Series offers two sets of volumes containing the most significant defenses and critiques of pragmatism written before World War I: the Early Defenders of Pragmatism and Early Critics of Pragmatism. This, the first collection, Early Defenders, provides key texts for understanding the context of pragmatism's years of greatest vitality. The early defenders were products of pragmatism's three cradles. H. Heath Bawden was a graduate of the Chicago philosophy department, having studied with John (...) Dewey and George Mead. John E. Boodin and Horace M. Kallen earned their Ph.Ds with William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard. D. L. Murray and Howard V. Knox were independent scholars and writers inspired by F. C. S. Schiller's humanistic pragmatism at Oxford. This collection brings together the central texts of the movement along with a representative selection of the secondary texts, reviews and responses, they elicited. Each volume features a newly-commissioned introduction by a leading scholar of American pragmatism. --five central texts reproduced in facsimile, accompanied by the main responses and replies, reset in new typography --scattered and scarce works available together for the first time --new introductions to each volume by leading scholars of American pragmatism. (shrink)

The first aim of science has been analysis. From Leucippus in the fifth century B.C. to Sir Arthur Eddington today, science has tried to reduce nature to simple structural units. For Leucippus the atoms are structurally alike, though they differ in external characteristics, such as size and shape. The aim of physics today is expressed by Sir Arthur Eddington: “The aim of the analysis employed in physics is to resolve the universe into structural units which are precisely alike one another... (...) so that all variety originates in the structure and not in the elements out of which the structure is built.” To be sure, that is an ideal. In practice we speak of electrons, protons, neutrons. But that does not alter the problem. The question is: Are there such structural units? (shrink)

To recognize the reality of the space-time structure of nature would, I think, revolutionize metaphysics. It means that we must conceive reality as history and history as having direction. It is not enough to take time seriously, we must take the order of time seriously. When we view the apparent confusion of nearby events, we may indeed be tempted to say with Heraclitus: “Time is a child playing drafts. The kingly power is a child's.” But if we take a long (...) view we may discern order. The early Greek pioneers started philosophy on the right track. Anaximander, the real founder of Western philosophy and science, had the brilliant intuition of an order of time as regulating the cosmic process. In the one direct quotation from Anaximander we are told: “And into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is meet; for they make reparation and satisfaction for their injustice according to the ordering of time.” It is because of the “ordering of time” that the universe is a self-maintaining whole. The development of the conception of the ordering of time was left to the great metaphysical genius of Heraclitus, who conceived a thought running through all things and steering through all things. There is a controlling direction of change which regulates the rhythm of exchange in nature and keeps the universe from running down. It was this emphasis upon the Word, the logos, the controlling order of change, which Heraclitus felt to be his important contribution. Change, continuous flux, is real, but there is a guiding order in change. (shrink)

We must start with the cosmos as a going concern and proceed at first analytically. Then we can reverse the process and examine the synthesis. Are there any characters which we must attribute to the cosmos taken as a whole—characters which we must take into account in all the various processes of nature? If so, we shall have a framework for metaphysics or cosmology. Owing to our new interest in nature, metaphysics merges into cosmology. In this respect we are going (...) back to the Greeks, whose interest was cosmic. (shrink)

[v. 1] Three interpretations of the universe.--[v. 2] God, a cosmic philosophy of religion.

Cleavages in philosophies--Cosmic implications of normative structure.

Introduction: the function of religion -- pt. 1. The consciousness of the divine: The sense of presence and intellectual abstraction. Christianity and the new sense of presence. The transition. Christianity and the copernican revolution -- pt. 2. The creative presence: The redefinition of God. God as creative energy. Cultivating the presence of God. Religion as sacramental communion -- pt. 3. Love and insight: The two points of view. Love as insight into God and the universe. Love's circles -- pt. 4. (...) Creative destiny: Individual destiny. Historic destiny. Cosmic destiny -- Epilogue. (shrink)

This book is an appealing, worthwhile, even illustrated study of the life and thought of an idealistic philosopher who has not been given the attention his originality deserves. John Elof Boodin belongs to what we may call the second generation of American idealists. Most of them studied under thinkers who represented the first real surge of idealistic thought on this continent. That group includes: G. S. Morris, B.P. Bowne, G. H. Howison, Josiah Royce, J. E. Creighton, and (...) Mary W. Calkins. Boodin’s generation includes J. A. Leighton, W. E. Hocking, Elijah Jordan, E. S. Brightman and Brand Blanshard. Only Jordan and Leighton are less well-know than Boodin. (shrink)

Boodin's theory of knowledge was but a moment in an unfolding metaphysical system. Although Truth and Reality began with a plea for the toleration of different metaphysical interpretations, on the ground that each system is the result of the peculiar perspective afforded by the temperament of the particular philosopher, Boodin nevertheless promised in the "preface" to publish a metaphysics, entitled A Realistic Universe. This book was a bold philosophical adventure, because it claimed nothing less than the application of (...) pragmatic method to the task of constructing a metaphysical system. By this Boodin meant "... that we must judge the nature of reality, in its various grades and complexities, by the consequences to the realization of human purposes, instead of by a priori assumptions". "The only key we have to reality is what reality must be taken as in the progressive realization of the purposes of human nature". The synoptic vision afforded by metaphysics, inextricably linked to a conception of reality as that with which human purposes must cope, is moreover grounded in the procedures and results of the empirical sciences. "Whenever philosophy has been vital," Boodin wrote in the "Introduction" to the first edition of A Realistic Universe, "it has always followed close upon the heels of science and human interest.". (shrink)