The Metaphysical Club
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The Metaphysical Club is a philosophical club that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., psychologist William James, polymath Charles Sanders Peirce and educator/philosopher John Dewey were involved in. Formed in January of 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "The Metaphysical Club," as it was called, 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. 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 aforementioned four giants of American intellectual thought. Menand essentially gives mini-biographies 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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