Pragmatism and Its Discontents:
Selected Bibliography

Compiled by Ralph Dumain

Borges, Jorge Luis. Nota Preliminar (1945), para Pragmatismo, un nuevo nombre para algunos viejos modos de pensar; conferencias de divulgación filosófica, de William James, traducción de Vicente P. Quintero (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1945), p. 9-12. Borges’ preface to a Spanish translation of William James’ Pragmatism.

Capps, John. Pragmatism and the McCarthy Era. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 29th Annual Meeting, Portland, Maine, March 7-9, 2002. On Menand, McCumber, and the 1951-1952 Journal of Philosophy debate.

Collins, Randall.  The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. (Paperback ed., 2000.) The dynamic of the development of pragmatism is also treated in this monumental global survey.

Cornforth, Maurice, Science Versus Idealism: In Defence of Philosophy Against Positivism and Pragmatism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. (Reprint of 1962 ed., originally published 1955.) Chapter 18: Pragmatism (pp. 372-423). Section 7: An “Idealism of Action"—Philosophy of American Imperialism.

Cornforth, Maurice; Horowitz, Irving Louis. “On Pragmatism,” Science & Society, vol. 19, no. 3, Summer, 1955, pp. 257-262.

See also Horowitz, Wells, below.

Cotkin, George. "Middle-Ground Pragmatists: The Popularization of Philosophy in American Culture," Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 55, no. 2, April 1994, 283-302. (Abstract/review)

Ducasse, C[urt] [John]. Philosophy as a Science, Its Matter and Its Method. New York: Oskar Piest, 1941. See Chapter 4: Philosophy as Light on Social Problems and Chapter 13: Philosophy, Wisdom, and the Application of Wisdom. On this site see quote from Chapter 13: Curt J. Ducasse on Wisdom, Norms, Theory, & Pragmatism.

Eastman, Max. The Last Stand of Dialectic Materialism: A Study of Sidney Hook’s Marxism. New York: Polemic Publishers, 1934.

Harris, Leonard, ed. The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. (Abstract/review)

Hitch, Marcus. “Pragmatism” [review of The Larger Aspects of Socialism by William English Walling], The International Socialist Review, vol. 14, no. 4, October 1913, pp. 234-235.

Hook, Sidney. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation. New York: John Day Co., 1933. Expanded edition: Ernest B. Hook, editor; with contributions by Paul Berman and Lewis S. Feuer and historical introduction by Christopher Phelps. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002. (Abstract/review)

Horowitz, Irving Louis. Review: Pragmatism: Philosophy of Imperialism by Harry K. Wells, Science & Society, vol. 18, no. 4, Fall, 1954, pp. 362-365.

See also Cornforth & Horowitz, above; Wells, below.

Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Includes chapter on pragmatism.

Lloyd, Brian.  Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922. Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. (Abstract/review)

Reviews:
Pettegrew, John. The Impracticalities of Pragmatism. May, 1999. (Abstract/review)

Ryder, John. Review, in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 1, pp. 197-203. (Abstract/review)

See also Tutt.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. (Abstract/review)

Reviews:
Malik, Kenan. Review.

Mills, C. Wright.  Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America. Edited with an introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz. New York: Paine-Whitman Publishers, 1964.

Novack, George. Pragmatism Versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey's Philosophy. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975. See also:

• American Intellectuals and the Crisis (February/June 1936)
• From Revisionism to Social-Chauvinism: I. The Degradation of Sidney Hook (June 1942)
• The Evolution of Randolph Bourne (Spring 1957)
• The Rise and Fall of Progressivism (Summer 1957)
• Jefferson, Lincoln and Dewey (Summer 1959)
• John Dewey’s Theories of Education (Winter 1960)
• The Fate of Dewey’s Theories (Spring 1960)
• American Philosophy and the Labor Movement (1962)
• Empiricism and Pragmatism (Chapter IX of Empiricism and Its Evolution: A Marxist View, 1968)

Phelps, Christopher. "The Rise and Fall of Sidney Hook," New Politics, vol. IX, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 34, Winter 2003. (Abstract/review)

Phelps, Christopher. "Towards the Understanding of Sidney Hook: The Recovery of Marxism", Against the Current, vol. XII, no. 2 [new series], May/June 1997, pp. 25-31. Adapted from a section of Phelps' then-forthcoming book. (Abstract/review)

Phelps, Christopher. Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. (Abstract/review)

Reviews:
Drucker, Peter. "Sidney Hook: Marxist Pioneer," New Politics, vol. 7, no. 1 (new series), whole no. 25, Summer 1998.

Philosophy Now, Pragmatism issue, no. 43, October/November 2003. (Abstract/review)

Riepe, Dale. "Critique of Idealistic Naturalism: Methodological Pollution in the Main Stream of American Philosophy," in Radical Currents in Contemporary Philosophy, edited by David H. DeGrood, Dale Riepe, & John Somerville (St. Louis, W. H. Green, 1971), pp. 5-22.

Ryder, John. Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought. Foreword by Nikita Pokrovsky, Moscow State University. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. (The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy) (Abstract/review)

Reviews:
Manicas, Peter T. Review, in Metaphilosophy, vol. 32, no. 4, July 2001.

Starr, Mark. "Organized Labor and the Dewey Philosophy," in: John Dewey, Philosopher of Science and Freedom: A Symposium, edited by Sidney Hook (New York: Dial Press, 1950), pp. 184-193.

Stebbing, L. Susan. Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, with Especial Reference to the Notion of Truth in the Development of French philosophy from Maine de Biran to Professor Bergson. Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1914.

Tutt, Daniel. “The Rise and Fall of Homegrown American Marxism,” Cosmonaut, May 27, 2022.

See also Lloyd.

Wells, Harry K. Pragmatism: Philosophy of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1954. Too crude a hatchet job. (Abstract/review)

See also Cornforth & Horowitz, Horowitz, above.

(3/15/2005; rev. 8/18/2005, 6/17/2006, 6/25/09, 2/19/10, 7/29/10, 6/12/11, 1/29/17, 2/10/18, 2/23/19, 2/14/21, 4/17/21, 11/9/21, 11/12/21, 5/28/22, 6/8/22)

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