Pragmatism, Old and New

Abstract

 C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, proposed a reformed, scientific philosophy guided by the pragmatic maxim, identifying the meaning of a concept with its experiential consequences. Over time, however, pragmatism evolved: from Peirce’s logical, ideal-realist articulation, through James’s more psychological and nominalist pragmatism, until, in our times, Richard Rorty, who proposes in the name of pragmatism that the metaphysical and epistemological territory at the traditional center of philosophy be abandoned, and that philosophy remake itself as a genre of literature, while at the other extreme such scientific philosophers as Paul Churchland and Stephen Stich also describe themselves as pragmatists. Looking at the history of pragmatism from Peirce and James through Dewey, Mead, and Schiller to the present, this article traces the transmutation of the old pragmatism into the new.