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The Metaphysical Club

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Public Radio / Military History / 20th Century
Abridged   7 hour(s)
Publication date: 08/17/2001

The Metaphysical Club

A Story of Ideas in America

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781565115422
Digital Download ISBN:9781598871791

Summary

This organization consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months. Yet its impact upon American intellectual life remains incalculable.

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Product Description

Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid—part history, part biography, part philosophy—consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months. Yet its impact upon American intellectual life remains incalculable. Louis Menand masterfully weaves pivotal late 19th-and early 20th-century events, colorful biographical anecdotes, and abstract ideas into a narrative whole that both enthralls and enlightens.

The Metaphysical Club is a compellingly vital account of how the cluster of ideas that came to be called pragmatism was forged from the searing experiences of its progenitors' lives. Here are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, all of them giants of American thought made colloquially accessible both as human beings and as intellects.

Author Bio

LOUIS MENAND is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and also has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Virginia School of Law. A staff writer at The New Yorker, he has been a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books since 1994. He lives in New York City.