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11. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB ~ September 2nd - September 8th ~~ Part Four - Chapter Eleven ~ (255 - 284) ~ Baltimore ~No-Spoilers, please
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Message One - on each non spoiler thread - will help you find all of the information that you need for each week's reading.
For Week Eleven - for example, we are reading and discussing the following:
Week Eleven - September 2nd - September 8th
Part Four - Chapter Eleven
Baltimore (255 - 284)
Please only discuss Chapter Eleven through page 284 on this thread. However from now on you can also discuss any of the pages that came before this week's reading - including anything in the Preface or Introduction or anything in Chapter One through Chapter Ten. However the main focus of this week's discussion is Chapter Eleven.
This is a non spoiler thread.
But we will have in this folder a whole bunch of spoiler threads dedicated to all of the pragmatists or other philosophers or philosophic movements which I will set up as we read along and on any of the additional spoiler threads - expansive discussions about each of the pragmatists/philosophers/philosophic movements can also take place on any of these respective threads. Spoiler threads are also clearly marked.
If you have any links, or ancillary information about anything dealing with the book itself feel free to add this to our Glossary thread.
If you have lists of books or any related books about the people discussed, or about the events or places discussed or any other ancillary information - please feel free to add all of this to the thread called - Bibliography.
If you would like to plan ahead and wonder what the syllabus is for the reading, please refer to the Table of Contents.
If you would like to write your review of the book and present your final thoughts because maybe you like to read ahead - the spoiler thread where you can do all of that is called Book as a Whole and Final Thoughts. You can also have expansive discussions there.
For all of the above - the links are always provided in message one.
Always go to message one of any thread to find out all of the important information you need.
Bentley will be moderating this book and Kathy will be the backup.
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Here are the rules and guidelines of the HBC:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5...
Please on the non spoiler threads: a) Stick to material in the present week's reading.
Also, in terms of all of the threads for discussion here and on the HBC - please be civil.
We want our discussion to be interesting and fun.
Make sure to cite a book using the proper format.
You don't need to cite the Menand book, but if you bring another book into the conversation; please cite it accordingly as required.
Now we can begin week eleven.....
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Chapter Eleven: Baltimore
Part 2, Chapter 11 - Baltimore, Section One
Part 2, Chapter 11 - Baltimore, Section Two
Part 2, Chapter 11 - Baltimore, Section Three
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The Metaphysical Club
by John Shook
The Metaphysical Club was an informal discussion group of scholarly friends, close from their associations with Harvard University, that started in 1871 and continued until spring 1879.
This Club had two primary phases, distinguished from each other by the most active participants and the topics pursued.
The first phase of the Metaphysical Club lasted from 1871 until mid-1875, while the second phase existed from early 1876 until spring 1879. The dominant theme of first phase was pragmatism, while idealism dominated the second phase.
Pragmatism - First Phase:
The "pragmatist" first phase of the Metaphysical Club was organized by Charles Peirce (Harvard graduate and occasional lecturer), Chauncey Wright (Harvard graduate and occasional lecturer), and William James (Harvard graduate and instructor of physiology and psychology).
These three philosophers were then formulating recognizably pragmatist views. Other active members of the "Pragmatist" Metaphysical Club were two more Harvard graduates and local lawyers, Nicholas St. John Green and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who were also advocating pragmatic views of human conduct and law.
Idealist - Second Phase:
The "idealist" second phase of the Metaphysical Club was organized and led by idealists who showed no interest in pragmatism: Thomas Davidson (independent scholar), George Holmes Howison (professor of philosophy at nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and James Elliot Cabot (Harvard graduate and Emerson scholar). There was some continuity between the two phases.
Although Peirce had departed in April 1875 for a year in Europe, and Wright died in September 1875, most of the original members from the first phase were available for a renewed second phase.
By January 1876 the "Idealist" Metaphysical Club (for James still was referring to a metaphysical club in a letter of 10 February 1876) was meeting regularly for discussions first on Hume, then proceeding through Kant and Hegel in succeeding years.
Besides Davidson, Howison, and Cabot, the most active members appear to be William James, Charles Carroll Everett (Harvard graduate and Dean of its Divinity School), George Herbert Palmer (Harvard graduate and professor of philosophy), and Francis Ellingwood Abbott (Harvard graduate and independent scholar).
Other occasional participants include Francis Bowen (Harvard graduate and professor of philosophy), Nicholas St. John Green, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and G. Stanley Hall (Harvard graduate and psychologist).
The Metaphysical Club was a nine-year episode within a much broader pattern of informal philosophical discussion that occurred in the Boston area from the 1850s to the 1880s.
Chauncey Wright, renowned in town for his social demeanor and remarkable intelligence, had been a central participant in various philosophy clubs and study groups dating as early as his own college years at Harvard in the early 1850s.
Wright, Peirce, James, and Green were the most active members of the Metaphysical Club from its inception in 1871.
By mid-1875 the original Metaphysical Club was no longer functioning; James was the strongest connection between the first and second phases, helping Thomas Davidson to collect the members of the "Idealist" Metaphysical Club.
Link to the Hegel Club:
James also was a link to the next philosophical club, the "Hegel Club", which began in fall 1880 in connection with George Herbert Palmer's seminar on Hegel. By winter 1881 the Hegel Club had expanded to include several from the Metaphysical Club, including James, Cabot, Everett, Howison, Palmer, Abbott, Hall, and the newcomer William Torrey Harris who had taken up residence in Concord.
This Hegel Club was in many ways a continuation of the St. Louis Hegelian Society from the late 1850s and 1860s, as Harris, Howison, Davidson, and their Hegelian students had moved east.
The Concord Summer School of Philosophy (1879-1888), under the leadership of Amos Bronson Alcott and energized by the Hegelians, soon brought other young American scholars into the orbit of the Cambridge clubs, such as John Dewey.
The "Pragmatist" Metaphysical Club met on irregular occasions, probably fortnightly during the Club's most active period of fall 1871 to winter 1872, and they usually met in the home of Charles Pierce or William James in Cambridge.
This Club met for four years until mid-1875, when their diverse career demands, extended travels to Europe, and early deaths began to disperse them. The heart of the club was the close bonds between five very unusual thinkers on the American intellectual scene.
Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce shared the same scientific interests and outlook, having adopted a positivistic and evolutionary stance, and their common love for philosophical discussion sparked the club's beginnings. Wright's old friend and lawyer Nicholas St. John Green was glad to be included, as was Peirce's good friend William James who had also gone down the road towards empiricism and evolutionism. William James brought along his best friend, the lawyer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who like Green was mounting a resistance to the legal formalism dominating that era. Green brought fellow lawyer Joseph Bangs Warner, and the group also invited two philosophers who had graduated with them from Harvard, Francis Ellingwood Abbott and John Fiske, who were both interested in evolution and metaphysics.
Other occasional members were Henry Ware Putnam, Francis Greenwood Peabody, and William Pepperell Montague.
Activities of the "Pragmatist" Metaphysical Club were recorded only by Peirce, William James, and William's brother Henry James, who all describe intense and productive debates on many philosophical problems.
Both Peirce and James recalled that the name of the club was the "Metaphysical" Club. Peirce suggests that the name indicated their determination to discuss deep scientific and metaphysical issues despite that era's prevailing positivism and agnosticism. A successful "Metaphysical Club" in London was also not unknown to them. Peirce later stated that the club witnessed the birth of the philosophy of pragmatism in 1871, which he elaborated (without using the term 'pragmatism' itself) in published articles in the late 1870s. His own role as the "father of pragmatism" should not obscure, in Peirce's view, the importance of Nicholas Green. Green should be recognized as pragmatism's "grandfather" because, in Peirce's words, Green had "often urged the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief as 'that upon which a man is prepared to act,' from which 'pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary'." Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as a vital alternative to rationalistic speculation.
The several lawyers in this club took great interest in evolution, empiricism, and Bain's pragmatic definition of belief.
They were also acquainted with James Stephen's A General View of the Criminal Law in England, which also pragmatically declared that people believe because they must act. At the time of the Metaphysical Club, Green and Holmes were primarily concerned with special problems in determining criminal states of mind and general problems of defining the nature of law in a culturally evolutionary way.
Both Green and Holmes made important advances in the theory of negligence which relied on a pragmatic approach to belief and established a "reasonable person" standard. Holmes went on to explore pragmatic definitions of law that look forward to future judicial consequences rather than to past legislative decisions.
(Source: http://www.pragmatism.org/research/me...)
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While reading the book - try to take some notes about the ideas presented along the following lines:
1. Science
2. Religion
3. Philosophy
4. Psychology
5. Sociology
6. Evolution
7. Pragmatism
There are very good reasons why this book is not only called The Metaphysical Club but also after the colon: A Story of Ideas in America and the purpose of our discussion of this book is "to discuss those ideas".
Don't just read my posts - but jump right in - the more you post and the more you contribute - the more you will get out of the conversation and the read.
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Remember we are discussing major ideas and events right off the bat:
Ideas:
Metaphysics
Pragmatism
Polygenism
The Metaphysical Club
Natural History
Monogenism
Theory of Recapitulation
Events:
The American Civil War
Ice Age
People:
Louis Agassiz
William James
French Paleontologist, George Cuvier
Prussian Naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt
Abbot Lawrence
Elizabeth Cabot Cary
Samuel George Morton
Josiah Nott
George Gliddon
Samuel Cartwright
Abraham Lincoln
Samuel Gridley Howe
Groups
Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers
Government:
The Constitution
Bill of Rights
Emancipation Proclamation
American Freedman's Inquiry Commission
Places
Harvard
Lawrence Scientific School
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Chapter abstracts are short descriptions of events that occur in each chapter.
They highlight major plot events and detail the important relationships and characteristics of characters and objects.
The Chapter Abstracts that I will add can be used to review what you have read, and to prepare you for what you will read.
These highlights can be a reading guide or you can use them in your discussion to discuss any of these points. I add them so these bullet points can serve as a "refresher" or a stimulus for further discussion.
Here are a few:
New Abstracts:
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New Questions:
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Interesting to see that it is still the relationship between religion and science that drives much of the philosophy of this era. Science is the new "king," but religion is such a part of the culture that it seems the people want it to be explained by science somehow.
Another dense chapter. I'm watching Menand circling and circling, drawing in more characters and events, but where are we going to land?It was interesting to learn about the inceptions of these well-known universities... I had no knowledge of the foundation of John Hopkins University, and I didn't know that U. of Michigan had such an early and reputable history.
There was a mention in this chapter (and now I can't find the page) of the philosophical theory that reality exists as tiny discreet moments that happen one after another. I think this is also a current scientific theory of reality/perception (which I can't recall the name of), and I am also fumbling for that source (a television documentary with Alan Alda hosting?)
And lastly, I was a little amazed at the reaction to Peirce's tristes and affairs outside his marriage. I recently read The Bolter: Edwardian Heartbreak and High Society Scandal in Kenya, which was very definitive about the English mores and loopholes that allowed and even supported adulterous behavior in British history, certainly for the husbands, and often for the wives. Apparently that thinking did not make it across the ocean.
by
Frances Osborne
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I agree with you, Janice. "Another dense chapter." I don't think any of these are light fare. Trying to wrap my mind around the section where we are trying to understand the mechanics of causation. Whew. (page 279) "Still, none of these arguments answered the question Peirce had started out with, which was whether the law of causation has a cause."
And then a gentle reminder from the author, (page 279) "On the Origin of Species is actually silent on the question of the origin."
by
Charles Darwin
Kathy wrote: "Trying to wrap my mind around the section where we are trying to understand the mechanics of causation. Whew. (page 279) "Still, none of these arguments answered the question Peirce had started out with, which was whether the law of causation has a cause..."Yes, I worked my way slowly through that one, too. My husband is in a post-grad program & digging his way through some conceptually challenging mathematics, such as: "We only need to verify solutions for problems that exist."
These mathematicians are funny guys.
Thanks Janice. The smile for the day!
We read that many Americans studied in Germany during this time period. That means that they needed to speak and read German. I was wondering when this changed, now the percentage of Americans that speak more than one language is the minority even among those that attend the university.I know that when I was in high school (many years ago) that we were encouraged to learn German even then if you planned to study science at the university level. Even now many high schools encourage a second language, but not required.
Just wondering?
Kathy wrote: "We read that many Americans studied in Germany during this time period. That means that they needed to speak and read German. I was wondering when this changed, now the percentage of Americans that..."My husband's degree in Chemistry required that he learn German, and this was in the 80's. Don't most colleges / universities require some sort of language to earn a BA?
A few thoughts from a heretofore non-participant.When I signed up for this History Club read, I came to the book thinking it would address how an American history of ideas from the last half of the 19th century -- an intellectual history -- correlated to or even initiated broader trends in American culture and in the growth of the nation. At this point in the story though, I feel like I've been laboring under a misapprehension. If you leave out the impact on Wendell Holmes of participating as a combatant in the Civil War, much of the story seems centered on how a small elite group of American philosophers and academicians reacted to, then later dismissed with the introduction of pragmatism, a uniquely European dialog shaped by the likes of Kant, Coleridge, Hegel, Laplace and of course Darwin. It could be reasonably argued that the most far-reaching idea emerging from this dialog was the German insistence that science, not religion, should rule the universities. This changes culture in ways that exploring whether 'causation has a cause' or how 'automata' interacts with free will never can. The blending of intellectual thought from James, Wright, Pierce, and Green that created pragmatism and later Vermont transcendentalism (Marsh) are consonant with American emphasis on values, results, and Christianity, but how much of this intellectual groundbreaking was getting into the culture at large? In other words, how much of it participated in the American zeitgeist? So far, the Howland affair and the Pierces very public testimony involving statistical analysis and probability theory -- part of the foundation of pragmatism -- is the closest we get to the Metaphysical Club intersecting with the man on the street. And there's nothing to this point that links the Club to surging American industrialism or the taming of the American West. Perhaps, by definition, the influence of philosophy will always be subordinate to the appetites of the marketplace, but like JG, I feel like I'm waiting for Menand to 'land' someplace.
All that said, this is the most intellectually exciting book I've read in some time. The balancing of the interesting biographical data with the linear progression of the philosophy is deft. If only I could begin to conceptualize and write just a little like Menand...
Thanks Frank H for the comments. We have been missing something without you. I too have been trying to figure out where we are going with the book, but also have enjoyed the intellectual challenge.
When I was reading this about gravity becoming a "habit", it struck me that this is very similar to the multi-universe theories. In this theory there are 17? fundamental "constants" but each universe can have a different set with each constant taking any value it wants for that universe. We happen to live in a universe where the constants cause gravity to attract at this particular value. There are other universes where gravity may not attract at all so there are no stars, planets or observers? to notice.
Patricrk wrote: "When I was reading this about gravity becoming a "habit", it struck me that this is very similar to the multi-universe theories. In this theory there are 17? fundamental "constants" but each unive..."Hmm interesting. Do you remember where you read or heard about this?
Thanks, Patrick. Always nice to learn something new.
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Origin of Species (other topics)The Bolter: Edwardian Heartbreak and High Society Scandal in Kenya (other topics)
The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Charles Darwin (other topics)Frances Osborne (other topics)
Louis Menand (other topics)
For the week of September 2nd - September 8th, we are reading Chapter Eleven of The Metaphysical Club.
Our motto at The History Book Club is that it is never too late to begin a book. We are with you the entire way.
The eleventh week's reading assignment is:
Week Eleven - September 2nd - September 8th
Part Four - Chapter Eleven
Baltimore (255 - 284)
We will open up a thread for each week's reading. Please make sure to post in the particular thread dedicated to those specific chapters and page numbers to avoid spoilers. We will also open up supplemental threads as we did for other spotlighted books.
This book was kicked off on June 26th. We look forward to your participation. Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other noted on line booksellers do have copies of the book and shipment can be expedited. The book can also be obtained easily at your local library, or on your Kindle. Make sure to pre-order now if you haven't already. Please also patronage your local book stores.
This weekly thread will be opened up on September 2nd.
There is no rush and we are thrilled to have you join us. It is never too late to get started and/or to post.
Bentley will be leading this discussion. Assisting Moderator Kathy will be the back up.
Welcome,
~Bentley
TO ALWAYS SEE ALL WEEKS' THREADS SELECT VIEW ALL
REMEMBER NO SPOILERS ON THE WEEKLY NON SPOILER THREADS - ON EACH WEEKLY NON SPOILER THREAD - WE ONLY DISCUSS THE PAGES ASSIGNED OR THE PAGES WHICH WERE COVERED IN PREVIOUS WEEKS. IF YOU GO AHEAD OR WANT TO ENGAGE IN MORE EXPANSIVE DISCUSSION - POST THOSE COMMENTS IN ONE OF THE SPOILER THREADS. THESE CHAPTERS HAVE A LOT OF INFORMATION SO WHEN IN DOUBT CHECK WITH THE CHAPTER OVERVIEW AND SUMMARY TO RECALL WHETHER YOUR COMMENTS ARE ASSIGNMENT SPECIFIC. EXAMPLES OF SPOILER THREADS ARE THE GLOSSARY, THE BIBLIOGRAPHY, THE INTRODUCTION AND THE BOOK AS A WHOLE THREADS.
Notes:
It is always a tremendous help when you quote specifically from the book itself and reference the chapter and page numbers when responding. The text itself helps folks know what you are referencing and makes things clear.
Citations:
If an author or book is mentioned other than the book and author being discussed, citations must be included according to our guidelines. Also, when citing other sources, please provide credit where credit is due and/or the link. There is no need to re-cite the author and the book we are discussing however.
If you need help - here is a thread called the Mechanics of the Board which will show you how:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2...
Glossary - SPOILER THREAD
Remember there is a glossary thread where ancillary information is placed by the moderator. This is also a thread where additional information can be placed by the group members regarding the subject matter being discussed.
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Bibliography - SPOILER THREAD
There is a Bibliography where books cited in the text are posted with proper citations and reviews. We also post the books that the author used in his research or in his notes. Please also feel free to add to the Bibliography thread any related books, etc with proper citations. No self promotion, please. And please do not place long list of books on the discussion threads. Please add to the bibliography thread where we love to peruse all entries. Make sure you properly cite your additions to make it easier for all.
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Book as a Whole and Final Thoughts - SPOILER THREAD
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Table of Contents and Syllabus:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...