Chapter 1 gives us a sort of pocket Peirce, from the pragmatic maxim ("Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Misak starts her story with synthetic accounts of Peirce's and James's main doctrines, Peirce having been almost ignored in Britain until at least the 1920s, while James was taken for more than two decades as the main representative of pragmatism. The first part of the book sets the stage. According to Misak, the three main actors in these transformations were Russell, Ramsey and Wittgenstein, who, she argues, have all taken on board some of the pragmatist doctrines of Peirce and James, Ramsey being the central character in the plot. The third difficulty, once these various stances are identified as belonging to the pragmatist movement, mostly with Peirce and James, consists in following the ways in which they have been discussed, modified or rejected by Cambridge philosophers who started from a very different philosophical outlook. Later on in her book and in her conclusion, the common pragmatic doctrines are more helpfully (and more classically) characterized as combining a conception of belief as a disposition to act, a conception of truth in its relation to success and to assertion, a fallibilist conception of knowledge as inquiry, and a certain kind of attitude towards ethical and religious matters. Adding that pragmatism is a form of naturalism or a form of commonsensism does not help very much either, since by such criteria, Hume, Reid and Moore would turn out to be pragmatists. However, this is rather vague, and could just as well characterize such doctrines as empiricism, positivism and existentialism. Misak tells us in her preface that "the insight at the heart of pragmatism is that any domain of inquiry - science, ethics, mathematics, logic, aesthetics - is human inquiry, and that our philosophical accounts of truth and knowledge must start with that fact" (p.ix). Indeed, rather than being a definite set of doctrines, pragmatism is a set of family resemblances between various views. Writers such as Dewey, Mead and Morris, took up the label of "pragmatism", but gave it a different turn, too, and today so many writers (from Richard Rorty to Robert Brandom, Huw Price and Michael Williams) have called their views "pragmatist" that it is hard to follow a common thread. Because James took up several of his ideas and gave them a very distinct Jamesian shape and, especially because of the "philistine" twist given to pragmatism by F.C.S Schiller and several Italian pragmatists, Peirce decided to drop the name, and coin a new term: "pragmaticism", "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers". Peirce, the founder of the movement, was a metaphysician, a logician and a scientist. Second, it is notoriously hard to pin down the distinctive theses of "pragmatism". There was, at least from the start, a cultural gap between the early analytic movement at Cambridge and pragmatism, in spite of many common intellectual origins (empiricism, Hegelianism). First, it is quite a challenge to describe the influence of a philosophical movement which is so distinctively American within such a distinctively British academic context. The difficulty of the enterprise is threefold. She concentrates on what happened roughly between 19, and suggests that we take as a key to this period the relationship that the founders of analytic philosophy in the English speaking world had to pragmatism, more precisely, "the relationship between two intellectual giants of Cambridge Massachusetts, Charles Peirce and William James, and two intellectual giants of Cambridge England, Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein" (p.ix).The main objective is to follow the complex philosophical plot of rejections and appropriations of pragmatist ideas by Cambridge during the first part of the twentieth century, and to show that, from several episodes of discoveries of James' and Peirce's ideas, a distinctive brand of British pragmatism emerged, culminating in Wittgenstein's avowal, in his late writings, that he was defending a "kind of pragmatism". But Cheryl Misak gives to this familiar narrative a new twist. The story of the relationships between certain trends of twentieth-century British philosophy and American pragmatism has, in a sense, been told many times, in books on the history of pragmatism (Thayer 1968), early analytic philosophy (Skorupski 1993), Russell (Vuillemin 1968), Moore (Baldwin 1990), and in many works devoted to Peirce (Hookway 1985), Ramsey (Mellor 1980, Sahlin 1990, Dokic and Engel 2002), Wittgenstein (McGuiness 1985), and the Vienna Circle (Stadler 1997).
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