Full name: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

Author: Louis Menand Year: 2001 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Award winners, Biographies, Politics, Science, Psychology, Philosophy Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads OpenLibrary Amazon eBooks.com LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780007126903 9780374528492 0007126905 0374528497

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist and the founder of semiotics. The club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. They also thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability. Similar books: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time by Will Durant A History of the American People by Paul Johnson The National Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin Happiness by Darrin M. McMahon Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen To America by Stephen E. Ambrose Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen E. Ambrose Intellectuals by Paul Johnson What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe The Fifties by David Halberstam Eyewitness to America by David Colbert The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh Einstein by Walter Isaacson