Concept
The Metaphysical Club
Overview
The Metaphysical Club was a name attributed by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, in an unpublished paper over thirty years after its foundation, to a conversational philosophical club that Peirce, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the philosopher and psychologist William James, amongst others, formed in January 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dissolved in December 1872. Other members of the club included Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner.
Within the philosophical discussions of the original club, pragmatism is said by Peirce to have been born. The name of the 1872 club was chosen "half-ironically, half-defiantly," according to Peirce, as the group rejected the radical foundationalist European metaphysics in favor of a moderate foundationalism, pursued critical thinking of a pragmatic and positivist nature.
However there is in fact no record of a club of this name in the writings of any of its members apart from Peirce, at the time or later, although Henry James mentioned in a letter that his brother had joined "a metaphysical club."
Upon Peirce's arrival at Johns Hopkins University in 1879, he founded a conversation club there which was definitively named The Metaphysical Club, open to faculty members and graduate students. Amongst its members was John Dewey.
The name The Metaphysial Club was adopted by Louis Menand for his 2001 book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, covering American philosophical thought in the second half of the nineteenth century and covering the ideas and lives of many of the members of Peirce's circles in Cambridge and in Johns Hopkins.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists.
William James, Pragmatism
States what The Metaphysical Club is; the author is tied to The Metaphysical Club in the knowledge graph.
Here more metaphysic is called for: The Absolute Reason is now supposed to work under limiting conditions of finitude, of a sensitive and temporal organism. The antecedents of reflective thought are not, therefore, determinations of thought pure and undefiled, but of what thought can do when it stoops to assume the yoke of change and of feeling. I pass by the metaphysical problem left unsolved by this flight: Why…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
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This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what The Metaphysical Club is.
Philosophers who discussed The Metaphysical Club
Related ideas
- John Dewey
- Positivism
- Johns Hopkins University
- Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Henry James
- William James
- Pragmatism
- John Fiske (philosopher)
- Chauncey Wright
- Nicholas St. John Green
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.