Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy

While it is widely acknowledged that pragmatist philosophy originated within an intellectual climate profoundly shaped by evolutionary theory and its initial reception in the United States, the details of this cultural environment and of its influence upon the early pragmatists have tended to receive less attention than they merit. Trevor Pearce's impressive and well-researched study addresses this gap in the literature on early pragmatism, but it is also intended to appeal to historians and philosophers of biology, given its focus upon the various debates to which evolutionary theory gave rise in late Nineteenth and early twentieth century America, not only between supporters and rivals of evolution, but also amongst champions of different schools of evolutionism. Pearce understands the pragmatist tradition in a broad sense, in terms of relations within and between 'cohorts' of scholars, not all of whom are customarily acknowledged as 'pragmatists' in standard histories of the movement, notwithstanding their overlapping historical experiences, academic environments and cultural climates. Focussing throughout upon their cultural context and the details of their interventions in an on-going debate which he traces from the 1860s to the first decade of the twentieth century, Pearce is primarily concerned to situate the pragmatists within their lively intellectual environment, rather than to reconstruct and elucidate their doctrines and arguments in less explicitly historical terms. As such, Pearce does not seek to specify any particular doctrinal content to which one must subscribe in order to qualify as an authentic pragmatist... (continues)

Trevor Pearce, Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, 2020, 365pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226719917.

Reviewed by Daniel Herbert, University of Sheffield