The American pragmatists

Introduction : The trajectory of American pragmatism

Part I. The founders of pragmatism : Pragmatist themes in early American thought : Introduction : Empiricism and idealism ; Puritanism ; Transcendentalism

Chauncey Wright (1830-75) : The English and Scottish influence ; Science, metaphysics, and religion ; Pragmatism, positivism, verificationism

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) : Influences ; The pragmatic maxim ; Inquiry: the fixation of belief ; Truth as indefeasibility ; Experience and reality ; Mathematics, metaphysics, religion, and morals ; Abduction, deduction, induction ; Regulative assumptions

William James (1842-1910) : Psychology and radical empiricism ; The pragmatic maxim and truth as usefulness ; The will to believe ; The breadth of experience ; Ethics

Fellow travelers : Oliver Wendell Holmes: law and experience ; Josiah Royce: Harvard idealism vs. Harvard pragmatism ; The extreme view of F.C.S. Schiller

Part II. The middle period : The reception of early American pragmatism : The British front ; The home front

John Dewey (1859-1952) : Dewey, Peirce, and James ; The theory of inquiry ; Dewey's metaphysics ; Truth and the quest for certainty ; Ethics and inquiry ; Democracy and political philosophy

Fellow travelers : George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and the Chicago School ; George Santayana (1863-1952) and the realists ; The New York naturalists and the state of pragmatism at the end of the classical era

Part III. The path to the twenty-first century. The rise of logical empiricism : Logical empiricism ; Peirce and logical empiricism ; Dewey and the unity of science movement ; Charles Morris and the resurrection of Peirce's theory of signs ; Logical empiricism turns to pragmatism

Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1964) : Pragmatist pedigree ; Lewis and the logical empiricism ; Anti-foundationalism and the given ; Value ; A pragmatic conception of the a priori

Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000) : The first dogma of empiricism and a pragmatic conception of the analytic ; The second dogma and the pragmatist theory of truth ; Holism without ethics

Fellow travelers : Morton Whit's full-time holism ; Nelson Goodman: induction and world-making ; Wilfred Sellars: norms and reasons

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) : Pragmatism vs. analytic philosophy ; Rorty's revolutionary pragmatism ; Truth and our practices ; Rorty's Less revolutionary pragmatism

Hilary Putnam (1926- ) : Pragmatist pedigree ; Truth and metaphysics ; Against disquotationalism ; Fact and value

The current debates : Inheritors of the classical positions ; Naturalism, anti-representationalism, disquotationalism ; One community or many? ; Conclusion.