Volume 12, Number 2 · January 30, 1969
The Power of Positive Pragmatism
By Morton White
The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
by A.J. Ayer
Freeman, Cooper, 336 pp., $8.00
Any philosopher of whatever persuasion who tries to write the history of his subject in America from its beginnings to the First World War will sooner or later discover that, of all the thinkers he is obliged to study, the two most brilliant and most original were those life-long friends and partners in pragmatism, Charles Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910). Both were sons of intellectual fathers, both were Harvard men, and both began their careers in natural science, but soon after their intellectual launchings they sailed into very different seas.
Review, 3344 words
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