The Metaphysical Club was a name attributed by the philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...
, in an unpublished paper over thirty years after its foundation, to a conversational philosophical club that Peirce, the future
Supreme Court Justice
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest-ranking judicial body in the United States. Its membership, as set by the Judiciary Act of 1869, consists of the chief justice of the United States and eight Associate Justice of the Supreme ...
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932.Holmes was Acting Chief Justice of the Un ...
, the philosopher and psychologist
William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...
, amongst others, formed in January 1872 in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...
, and dissolved in December 1872. Other members of the club included
Chauncey Wright
Chauncey Wright (September 10, 1830 – September 12, 1875) was an American philosopher and mathematician, who was an influential early defender of Darwinism and an important influence on American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Wil ...
,
John Fiske,
Francis Ellingwood Abbot
Francis Ellingwood Abbot (November 6, 1836 – October 23, 1903) was an American philosopher and theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method.
His lifelong romance with his wife Katharine Fearing Loring form ...
,
Nicholas St. John Green, and
Joseph Bangs Warner.
Within the philosophical discussions of the original club,
pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
is said by Peirce to have been born. The name of the 1872 club was chosen "half-ironically, half-defiantly," according to Peirce, as the group rejected the radical foundationalist European metaphysics in favor of a moderate foundationalism, pursued critical thinking of a pragmatic and positivist nature.
However there is in fact no record of a club of this name in the writings of any of its members apart from Peirce, at the time or later, although
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...
mentioned in a letter that his brother had joined "a metaphysical club."
Upon Peirce's arrival at
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...
in 1879, he founded a conversation club there which was definitively named The Metaphysical Club, open to faculty members and graduate students. Amongst its members was
John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the f ...
.
The name ''The Metaphysial Club'' was adopted by
Louis Menand
Louis Menand (; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic, essayist, and professor, best known for his Pulitzer-winning book ''The Metaphysical Club'' (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
L ...
for his 2001 book, ''
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America'', covering American philosophical thought in the second half of the nineteenth century and covering the ideas and lives of many of the members of Peirce's circles in Cambridge and in Johns Hopkins.
[Menand (2001)]
References
Sources
*
Menand, Louis, ''The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America'' (2001), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (hardcover), (paperback)
Further reading
* Shook, John R. (n.d),
The Metaphysical Club at the ''Pragmatism Cybrary''. Includes an account of the Club and individualized accounts of Chauncey Wright, Nicholas St. John Green, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Joseph Bangs Warner, along with bibliographies, complete ones in the cases of Wright and Green.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Metaphysical Club, The
Philosophical societies in the United States
Charles Sanders Peirce
Organizations established in 1872
Organizations disestablished in 1872
1872 establishments in Massachusetts
William James