Category: Philosophy & Ethics
The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are printed as delivered, without developments or notes. The pragmatic movement, so-called--I do not like t...
Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our 'personal identity.' He immediate...
11. Chapter 11We cannot then take a step forward in our actual thinking. When shall I acknowledge this truth and when that? Shall the acknowledgment be loud?--or silent? If sometimes loud, so...
6. Chapter 6This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity. His designs have grown so vast as to b...
2. Chapter 2These two systems are what you have to choose between if you turn to the tender-minded school. And if you are the lovers of facts I have supposed you to be, you find the trail o...
4. Chapter 4The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent; truth that we FIND merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; suc...
13. Chapter 13But he believes himself to face backward. He speaks of what he calls the rational UNITY of things, when all the while he really means their possible empirical UNIFICATION. He su...
8. Chapter 8After discussing the unity of the universe in this pragmatic way, you ought to see why I said in my second lecture, borrowing the word from my friend G. Papini, that pragmatism...
12. Chapter 12We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or UNWORTHY? Suppose a universe composed of...
3. Chapter 3Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the di...
10. Chapter 10But matters of fact are not our only stock in trade. RELATIONS AMONG PURELY MENTAL IDEAS form another sphere where true and false beliefs obtain, and here the beliefs are absolu...
1. Chapter 1The lectures that follow were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York. They are pri...
7. Chapter 7The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other. Just as with...
9. Chapter 9But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its steering function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI, intellects only curious and idle, have f...