The Pragmatism and Prejudice
of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
American Philosophy Series
Series Editor: John J. Kaag, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Advisory Board: Charlene Haddock Siegfried, Joe Margolis, Marilyn Fischer, Scott Pratt, Douglas Anderson, Erin McKenna, and Mark Johnson
The American Philosophy Series at Lexington Books features cutting-edge scholarship in the burgeoning field of American philosophy. Some of the volumes in this series are historically oriented and seek to reframe the American canon’s primary figures: James, Peirce, Dewey, and Du Bois, among others. But the intellectual history done in this series also aims to reclaim and discover figures (particularly women and minorities) who worked on the outskirts of the American philosophical tradition. Other volumes in this series address contemporary issues—cultural, political, psychological, educational—
using the resources of classical American pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. Still others engage in the most current conceptual debates in philosophy, explaining how American philosophy can still make meaningful interventions in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and ethical theory.
Recent titles in the series:
The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., edited by Seth Vannatta
Richard Rorty and the Problem of Postmodern Experience: A Reconstruction, by Tobias Timm
Peirce and Religion: Knowledge, Transformation, and the Reality of God, by Roger A. Ward
William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Ethical Life, edited by Jacob L. Goodson
Epistemic Issues in Pragmatic Perspective, by Nicholas Rescher
Loving Immigrants in America: An Experiential Philosophy of Personal Interaction, by Daniel G. Campos
The Religious Dimension of Experience: Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy, by David W. Rodick
Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting, by Nicholas L. Guardiano
The Pragmatism and Prejudice
of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Edited by Seth Vannatta
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Chapter 6 © 2019 by Catharine Wells.
Chapter 8 © 2019 by Susan Haack.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-4985-6124-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-4985-6125-9 (electronic)
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About The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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. |
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