Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy Illustrated Edition

Two generations of Anglophone philosophers taught their students that Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey were, as Kitcher succinctly frames the old prejudice in this book, "well-intentioned but benighted, laboring with crude tools to develop ideas that were [so the story went] far more rigorously and exactly shaped by the immigrants from Central Europe whose work generated" the "analytic" tradition in philosophy. Kitcher notes that some recent neopragmatist scholarship on Dewey has sought, as a sort of re-domestication project, to bring him back into "the pantheon of respectable philosophers." Yet the point for Dewey, Kitcher observes, was "not to continue philosophy-as-usual, but to change it." In Preludes to Pragmatism, Kitcher compellingly presents Dewey's naturalism as a powerful alternative to the anemia of philosophy too often approached as a form of verbal conquest and scholasticism confined to “timeless” core problems manufactured by a small esoteric class of symbolic technicians.