The Truth Is What Works
Subtitle: William James,  Pragmatism,  and the Seed of Death
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,  Inc.
Published: December 28, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Textbook Binding
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780847692736
Subjects: Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present; Topics in philosophy; Movements - Pragmatism; History; Philosophy; History & Surveys - 19th Century; Philosophy / Pragmatism; Contributions in pragmatism; 1842-1910; 19th century; James, William,; Pragmatism
Description: Charles Sanders Peirce complained that James allowed pragmatism to become "infected" with "seeds of death" like the idea that truth is mutable. The Truth Is What Works is an attempt to defend James's pragmatic theory of truth from a wide range of critics including Peirce, Bertrand Russel, Hilary Putnam, and Cornel West. Cormier runs the gauntlet of historical and contemporary criticism in an attempt to show, not that Jamesian pragmatism does in fact contain a perfectly good theory of objective reality after all, but rather that it doesn't and is still a kind of realism anyway because it does not leave individuals and their subjective desires behind in an attempt to describe the real world.