The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

The Metaphysical Club
AuthorLouis Menand
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date
2001
Media typePrint
Pages384
ISBN0-374-19963-9

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America is a 2001 book by Louis Menand, an American writer and legal scholar, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. The book recounts the lives and intellectual work of the handful of thinkers primarily responsible for the philosophical concept of pragmatism, a principal feature of American philosophical achievement: William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. Pragmatism had a significant influence on modern thought, by, for example, spurring movements in legal thought such as legal realism.