The Roots of Diversity in Pragmatic Thought

Abstract

In this chapter, I would like to discuss a few figures and ideas that should help indicate both the roots of diversity in the pragmatic tradition and the democratic import of this diversity. One place to begin is with the Cambridge Metaphysical Club of Chauncey Wright, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and others. All of them were graduates of Harvard and members of its extended intellectual community, and their interactions fostered the common development of pragmatic themes. Of the Metaphysical Club, Philip Wiener writes that one of its “most striking features” was “the rich diversity of interests and training of its members in natural and social sciences, logic, ethics, metaphysics, history, and legal practice.”1 I would especially emphasize Wiener’s use of the term “diversity” here because, in the context of early 1870s Cambridge, “diversity” means no more than what Wiener points to: an opening up of the old-time college’s narrow curriculum of Latin and Greek, mathematics and bits of science, and other largely “cultural” subjects, all presented as part of the tapestry of a religious understanding of life. The new Harvard, the Harvard to which the members of the Metaphysical Club belonged, was making room for more deliberate inquiry into the natural and social sciences, but also into humanistic studies like logic, ethics, history, and legal practice, all approached in a more naturalistic fashion.