"Speculative pragmatism" is a response to John Dewey's "plea for speculative audacity". It should come to be regarded as a major contribution to metaphysics and to the ongoing renaissance of American pragmatist philosophy. Rosenthal restates some of the major themes in the writings of Peirce, James, Dewey, Lewis and Mead, criticizing and modifying them where necessary, and advances new doctrines inspired by the collective corpus of these five classical pragmatists. The author is not concerned with history of ideas for its own sake, but with "an elusive common spirit, a common philosophic pulse, permeating an incipient cosmic vision". Rosenthal begins with pragmatism and scientific method, moves to a consideration of perceptual experience, and thence to metaphysics, offering "a speculative analysis, via extrapolation from the pervasive features of lived experience, of what ...independent reality must be like", then outlines a pragmatist view of "value", and finally considers "the nature of philosophic system itself".
- ISBN10 0870235265
- ISBN13 9780870235269
- Publish Date 16 October 1986
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 2 October 2008
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Massachusetts Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 224
- Language English