The Promise of Pragmatism (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: John Patrick Diggins
- First Published: 1994
- Type of Work: History of ideas
- Time of Work: Late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries
- Setting: The United States and Western Europe
- Principal Characters: Henry Adams, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Walter Lippmann, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: History, Philosophy or philosophers, Pragmatism, Power, personal or social, Politics, God, Political science, Truth, Liberalism, Metaphysics, Constitutions
- Locales: Europe, United States
John Patrick Diggins, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, characterizes the sensibility of “modernism” (which extended from the end of the nineteenth century through the first three or four decades of the twentieth) as an “awareness of the dualism between nature and spirit that enhances the means of control while diminishing a conception of moral ends.” Gone was the traditional view that human thought mirrored or represented a determinate, and meaningful, extrahuman reality. Modernist intellectuals saw human beings as the...
[The entire page is 2194 words long]
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