A Companion to Pragmatism

Generally speaking, pragmatism has had a bad press. Not only has the popular meaning of the word come to mean “merely practical, often opportunistically so”, but even its philosophical meaning seems threatened as moribund – “pragmatism as a movement cannot be said to alive today” (entry Pragmatism in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Borchert, 2006) (RR 2006/297)). Pragmatism is associated with three major figures – Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey – and with philosophy in the early years of the twentieth century, in America, and with a brief and ambivalent re‐awakening in the neo‐pragmatism of the 1980s...