This book investigates the extent to which various scholarly labels are appropriate for the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Louis Menand wrote, “Holmes has been called a formalist, a positivist, a utilitarian, a realist, a historicist, a pragmatist, (not to mention a nihilist).” Each of the eight chapters investigates one label, analyzes the secondary texts that support the use of the term to characterize Holmes’s philosophy, and takes a stand on whether or not the category is appropriate for Holmes by assessing his judicial and nonjudicial publications, including his books, articles, and posthumously published correspondences. The thrust of the collection as a whole, nevertheless, bends toward the stance that Holmes is a pragmatist in his jurisprudence, ethics, and politics. The final chapter, by Susan Haack, makes that case explicitly. Edited by Seth Vannatta, this book will be of particular interest to students and faculty working in law, jurisprudence, philosophy, intellectual history, American Studies, political science, and constitutional theory.

In this unique book, Alexander Lian, a practicing commercial litigator, advances the thesis that the most famous article in American jurisprudence, Oliver Wendell Holmes's “The Path of the Law,” presents Holmes's leading ideas on legal education. Through meticulous analysis, Lian explores Holmes's fundamental ideas on law and its study. He puts “The Path of the Law” within the trajectory of Holmes's jurisprudence, from earliest scholarship to The Common Law to the occasional pieces Holmes wrote or delivered after joining the U.S. Supreme Court. Lian takes a close look at the reactions “The Path of the Law” has evoked, both positive and negative, and restates the essay's core teachings for today's legal educators. Lian convincingly shows that Holmes's “theory of legal study” broke down artificial barriers between theory and practice. For contemporary legal educators, Stereoscopic Law reformulates Holmes's fundamental message that the law must been seen and taught three-dimensionally.

W. V. Quine’s occasional references to his ‘pragmatism’ have often been interpreted as suggesting a possible link to the American Pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction argues that the influence of pragmatism on Quine’s philosophy is more accurately traced to his teacher C.I. Lewis and his conceptual pragmatism from Mind and the World Order, and his later An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. Quine’s epistemological views share many affinities with Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism, where knowledge is conceived as a conceptual framework pragmatically revised in light of what future experience reveals. Robert Sinclair further defends and elaborates on this claim by showing how Lewis’s influence can be seen in several key episodes in Quine’s philosophical development. This not only highlights a forgotten element of the epistemological backdrop to Quine’s mid-century criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction, but Sinclair further argues that it provides the central epistemological framework for the form and content of Quine’s later naturalized conception of epistemology.

Pragmatism, Logic and Law offers a view of legal pragmatism consistent with pragmatism writ large, tracing it from origins in late 19th century America to the present, covering various issues, legal cases, personalities, and relevant intellectual movements within and outside law. It addresses pragmatism’s relation to legal liberalism, legal positivism, natural law, critical legal studies (CLS), and post-Rorty “neopragmatism.” It views legal pragmatism as an exemplar of pragmatism’s general contribution to logical theory, which bears two connections to the western philosophical tradition: first, it extends Francis Bacon’s empiricism into contemporary aspects of scientific and legal experience, and second, it is an explicitly social reconstruction of logical induction. Both notions were articulated by John Dewey, and both emphasize the social or corporate element of human inquiry. Empiricism is informed by social as well as individual experience (which includes the problems of conflict and consensus). Rather than following the Aristotelian model of induction as immediate inference from particulars to generals, a model that assumes a consensual objective viewpoint, pragmatism explores the actual, and extended, process of corporate inference from particular experience to generalization, in law as in science. This includes the necessary process of resolving disagreement and finding similarity among relevant particulars.

The essays in Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience offer a survey of the ways that “resilience” is becoming a key concept for understanding our world, as well as providing deeper insight about its specific actual and proposed applications. As a concept with multiple theoretical and practical meanings, “resilience” promises considerable explanatory power. At the same time, current uses of the concept can be diverse and at times inconsistent. The American philosophical tradition provides tools uniquely suited for clarifying, extending, and applying emerging concepts in more effective and suggestive ways. This collection explores the usefulness of theoretical work in American philosophy and pragmatism to practices in ecology, community, rurality, and psychology.

This book explores "real" valuation through tracing the pragmatic meanings of "mattering." Employing Peirce's overall pragmatic method and realism to understand what we mean when we say something "matters," it encourages consideration of the practices we engage in, the values attached to those practices, and their consequences.

This book examines points of meaningful affinity as well as contention and misrecognition between philosophical traditions of the Americas. Using Rodó’s metaphors from The Tempest, it reflects on the perils and possibilities for Inter-American philosophy as an established historical fact, a form of propaganda, or as a legitimate aspiration.