At least the internet doesn’t forget. I finished this book and had a question about the exact title. Right there on the first page of the search results appeared an entry from this very blog. It turns out I read this book in 2018. Who knew?

Let’s see if I agree with myself. (I see I left out a word. Now corrected.)

Well, I was concerned about trying to summarize this book today. I must have felt the same two years ago, since that earlier summary includes a lot of quotation. But I stand by every word (including the one I just added)!

I’ll simply add one thing.

Part of the author’s purpose was to counter the popular understanding among philosophers that pragmatism as a philosophical movement faded away in the 20th century under intense criticism, especially after the death of John Dewey in 1952. Misak shows it’s more accurate to say pragmatism was absorbed rather than replaced. Many of the leading philosophers in the last half of the 20th century (including former members of the Vienna Circle, as well as W. V. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson) argued for positions quite compatible with the early pragmatists, especially the views of Charles Sanders Pierce, even though these later philosophers rarely called themselves “pragmatists”. The same holds true for philosophers in this century. It’s the label that has mostly disappeared.

The American Pragmatists is worth reading, but repetitious at times. There are only so many points you can make about a concept like “truth”. But I want to learn more about two philosophers Misak thinks highly of: Clarence Irving Lewis and Hilary Putnam. I’ve got some of their books. I should open them — that’s what a pragmatist would do.