The Metaphysical Club

What Hacker News says

1. backtoyoujimNov 2024
   "The Metaphysical Club" is a great book about this subject and these folks.
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2. llamaimperativeMay 2024
   You’re definitely onto something there. I highly recommend the book The Metaphysical Club which follows a specific group of thinkers (the Pragmatists) who formed much of the foundation of American legal theory.

   The TLDR: Every legal system is governed primarily by the “moral culture” and constructed to defend/enact/perpetuate that culture. When the moral culture changes enough, the laws will change (or the interpretation or application of the laws for the same de facto effect).

   So the question for all of us is how to steer the moral culture in preferred directions, which is why I was calling out your initial comment! It’s not good for people to come to the belief that laws don’t matter — such a belief is self-fulfilling at certain scale.

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3. ethanbondJan 2024
   The Metaphysical Club is an excellent book about how the pragmatists shaped all of American thought, too.

   Obviously doesn’t replace reading the source material but it does articulate how ideas become encoded into a society.

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4. smacktowardJan 2020
   To get you started, I’ll recommend you one book that checks all three boxes at once: Louis Menand’s magisterial The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28202).

   Enjoy :-D

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5. jonstewartFeb 2019
   Louis Menand’s _The Metaphysical Club_, from 2001. It is a combined history of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and their later acolyte, John Dewey, as well as of their related ideas, which go by the shorthands Pragmatism and Pluralism. Although a formal history, Menand is a fine writer and there’s much practical philosophy in here, much of which serves as the wellspring for other contemporary books cited in comments here. It was a great book for understanding America, strains of American thought, and how not to be wrong.
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6. smacktowardJan 2019
   If you're interested in Dewey (both the man and his ideas), I can't recommend reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Club-Story-Ideas-America...) highly enough. It's truly magisterial, and will give you insight not just on Dewey but on the entire sweep of his intellectual age as well.
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