Pragmatism

Main ideas

• Meaning clarified by practical consequences.
• Truth understood as what proves itself in experience and inquiry.
• Philosophical temperaments compared rather than erased.

Important themes

Reading context

Lectures given in 1906 and 1907 offering pragmatism as a way of settling disputes that otherwise run forever, by asking what practical difference each answer would make.

How to approach it

Lectures 2 and 6 give the method and the account of truth. James is a superb writer, so this is the rare philosophical classic to read straight through.