Reviews for Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas

The average rating for Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-25 00:00:00 nah son Denying the Privilege and Presumption of Power Philosophy is, more often than it likes to admit, a response to traumatic political events. It is therefore frequently less about the concepts it makes explicit - knowledge, truth, correct action - than it is about dealing with the lingering consequences of profound social upset. The Metaphysical Club documents this thesis in its analysis of the roots of American Pragmatism. Few might recognise today that the various schools of American Pragmatism associated with philosophers from C. S. Peirce in the 19th century to Richard Rorty in the 21st century have their origins in a specific national tragedy, the American Civil War. The intention of the first 'pragmaticists' (as Peirce called them) was to release the world from the doctrinaire use of reason that they perceived led to that conflict. Often confused with 'vulgar relativity,' Pragmatism is really a recognition that none of us actually knows what constitutes reason. The criteria of right thinking change about as frequently as what is thought. The contribution of pragmatic philosophy has been to establish truth as a necessary ideal but error as an equally necessary condition of inquiry. The essential lesson is one of humility rather than scepticism. As the pragmatist philosopher Edgar Singer quipped in the 1930's, "A fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact." This maxim is useful to keep in mind when dealing with various Trumpian attacks on science and the media as well as the fake news that has become routine on social media. All knowledge is incomplete and defective. This is a consequence of human finitude. Nevertheless, some claims to knowledge are better than other claims. Distinguishing between what constitutes approaches to the truth and intellectual dead ends is what Pragmatism seeks to accomplish - mainly to help us stop killing each other. Pragmatism therefore implies a liberalism of thought that denies privileged or preferred modes of thinking. At the same time it seeks to reconcile contrary modes of thinking in the 'larger truth.' Its ethical virtues are respect for the intentions of others, confidence that there is indeed a larger truth to be had, and the patience to persist in the search. These are commonly called by their classical names of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-12-10 00:00:00 Sidney Broadway Iii Although this is a supposed quadruplicate biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, it's really an unparalleled intellectual history of America from the Civil War up through the turn of the century. Thankfully it doesn't try to be a comprehensive intellectual history, and it doesn't try to trot out every "important" thinker of the age and analyze them for relevance. It's mainly a circuitous and winding story of how that most American of philosophical systems, "pragmatism," with its suspicions of transcendent ideals and its awareness of multiple contexts, emerged gradually out of the mystical antebellum New England world of Emerson and Thoreau. It's seemingly disparate chapters, which focus on such people as naturalist Louis Agassiz and reformer Jame Addams, at first seem difficult to pin together, but gradually the reader realizes that this is a way to show how many individual threads were woven into pragmatic philosophy. While other writers act like philosophers were only reading other philosophers, Louis Menand uses multiple biographies to show how real life and real events shaped abstract thought. For instance, William James saw the failure of Louis Agassiz's quest for an overarching natural explanation of the animal world, one that relied on God's placement of all animals in their current environments (a quest which led him, with James, to look for evidence of glaciers in Brazil), as confirmation of a world mainly governed by blind evolution and chance. Holmes's experience at the tragic Battle of Ball's Bluff in the Civil War soured him on all high ideals, and his "survival of the fittest" theory later influenced his theory of judicial restraint (by which he hoped to let interest groups battle it out in politics) and paradoxically made him a liberal hero. Charles Pierce's wrestling with astronomical observations as an employee of the US Coastal Survey led him to look at the fallibility of all human judgment and search for a probabilistic theory of thought. John Dewey's concern over the 1894 Pullman strike, and his connections to Jane Addams, made him search for a tolerant pluralism that would encompass all apparent conflict into an actual unity. Interestingly, a large part of the book is a biography of that strange, in-bred world of 19th century Boston (of course centered around Harvard), where everybody seemed to be a cousin or son or wife of a famous thinker and writer, and where everybody was part of their own philosophical club. Menand shows that before one can talk about a philosophy, one needs to talk about the peculiar environment that philosophy emerged from. The pragmatists would of course have entirely agreed. I can honestly say that I've never read a book like this anywhere, one that brings so much to the table and makes it all seem so interconnected. Menand is someone who actually knows how to mold a good story out of abstract ideas, and who makes all these ancient, intractable debates seem important and worthwhile.