The Metaphysical Club (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Louis Menand
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: Approximately 1850 to 1920
- Setting: Boston, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Burlington, Vermont
- Principal Characters: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Chauncey Wright
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Philosophy or philosophers, Twentieth century, Nineteenth century, New York City, Midwest, Chicago, New England, Boston, Judges, Metaphysics, Mathematics or mathematicians, Illinois, Massachusetts, Vermont
- Locales: Boston, MA, New York, Chicago, IL, Baltimore, MD, Burlington, VT
In the nineteenth century, long before American universities had established their role as disinterested centers of learning, ideas in the United States were often developed and disseminated in regular literary and philosophical meetings. Probably the most famous of these gatherings was the Saturday Club, which met in Boston before the Civil War, and whose members included some of the most important thinkers of the time: the Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz and the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Metaphysical Club was a similarly...
[The entire page is 1748 words long]
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