A classic. Maybe James didn't really understand C S Pierce, but he was that rare thing, a readable philosopher. ( )

I can’t “rate” this book because I only understood a tiny fraction of it. It’s a series of 8 lectures, and I had the impression it was not delivered to professional philosophers or even to philosophy students - but the attendees must have been quite well educated if they had any chance of comprehending the lectures. The book was published in 1907 but I think the lectures may have been given several years before that. Anyway, I “read” the book in some sense but vast portions were completely meaningless to me. Oh well. I’m really fascinated by philosophy, but so much of it is impenetrable for me.

12/10/21

12/4/21

This reread helped me to realize just how fundamental this book is to Richard Rorty's more recent formulation of pragmatism, and to his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. A lot seems antiquated in James (e.g. his use of humanism as a stand in for pragmatism), but his discussion of Truth/truth, his attempts to resist charges of idealism, his approach to defining a material world that is not there to be corresponded to and that is not o be ignored except at one's own hazard, his repeated emphasis on the consequences of pragmatism are all core building blocks for Rorty (and, yes, many other neo-pragmatists). ( )