The Vanderbilt library of American philosophy
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Books in this Series
His Glassy Essence
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the most important and influential of the classical American philosophers, is credited as the inventor of the philosophical school of pragmatism. The scope and significance of his work have had a lasting effect not only in several fields of philosophy but also in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science, and the theory of signs, as well as in literary and cultural studies. Inspired by his friendship and correspondence with the novelist Walker Percy, who himself was absorbed by the life and writings of Peirce, Ketner adopts a narrative strategy that lets Peirce tell his own early life story. He weaves the voluminous components of an intellectual biography that are scattered throughout Peirce's published and unpublished writings into a novelistic account that reads like a mystery. Ketner offers satisfying explanations and convincing hypotheses for a number of intimate and controversial aspects of Peirce's eventful yet frustrated life, including his inability to find a permanent teaching position at any university, the ancestry of Peirce's wife Juliette and the source of his family's hostility toward her, and the previously unknown fact that Peirce actually had three wives instead of two.
The thought and character of William James
When it was originally published in a two-volume edition in 1935, Ralph Barton Perry's magisterial work on William James was greeted with much critical acclaim. A briefer one-volume edition was published in 1947 to serve as both a systematic account of James's development and a repository of selections from his unpublished writings. The one-volume work (which forms the basis for this new paperback edition) offers a brief and convenient sourcebook of James's thought, set forth in terms that require no previous familiarity with technical problems of philosophy and psychology. An anthology of well-edited primary source material as well as a critical biography, The Thought and Character of William James today remains a classic text in the field of American philosophy. Interspersed throughout Perry's insightful and engaging narrative are excerpts not only from James but from many other of the leading philosophical figures of his day, including Bergson, Davidson, Dewey, Emerson, Holmes, both the elder and the younger Henry James, Peirce, Royce, and Santayana. The whole is a gracefully written examination of the life of a key American philosopher and an illuminating introduction to many of the founding personalities that today define American philosophy.