The Professor of Complacence," if the philosopher Richard Rorty...

[Michael Pugliese]

This week in the magazine
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/082001/blackburn082001.html
, Simon Blackburn wonders, in "The Professor of Complacence," if the
philosopher Richard Rorty really believes that walking around a golf course
is as bad as walking around Auschwitz. Probably not, but "Rorty is just the
militant tendency of contemporary pragmatism," Blackburn writes, "the
Hezbollah of our disenchanted culture." William James, who "invented
pragmatism as a favor to Charles Peirce," Louis Menand writes in his
excellent new book The Metaphysical Club, might have been surprised by the
development of the philosophy that has come down from Peirce, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, John Dewey, and James himself. (I get the impression that Peirce
would have been less befuddled; he seems to have been considerably more
bloody-minded.) The Metaphysical Club, a history of those four thinkers and
the wave of post-Civil-War American intellectual history they commanded, is
one of those rare books that manages to combine a magisterial sweep of
thought with a light touch; it is wonderfully entertaining without ever
compromising. --Dan Halpern, TNR Online