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The Metaphysical Club is the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History.
A riveting, original book about the creation of modern American thought.The Metaphysical Club was a casual group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of america Supreme Court; William James, the daddy of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas. This book is the storyplot of that idea.Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be learned but are tools people invent -- like knives and forks and microchips -- to make their way on the globe. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are completely depent -- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps not on its immutability but on its adaptability.The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of the idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a tale about America. It commences with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion regarding U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four parts of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The final section discusses a few of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. That is a book in regards to a thought process that changed American life."
