When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the...

Oxford Pragmatism uncovers and explores the unrecognized impact of American pragmatism on the Oxford linguistic philosophy that thrived from the 1930s to the 1950s, made famous by Gilbert Ryle and J. L Austin. Cheryl Misak argues that Margaret Macdonald, a neglected British analytic philosopher and excellent scholar of American pragmatism, delivered core pragmatist ideas to her friend Ryle: the mind as a set of dispositions to behave; laws as 'inference tickets', and the distincti...

Cheryl Misak presents a history of the great American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, from its inception in the Metaphysical Club of the 1870s to the present day. This ambitious new account identifies the connections between traditional American pragmatism and contemporary philosophy and argues that the most defensible version of pragmatism -- roughly, that of Peirce, Lewis, and Sellars -- must be seen and recovered as an important part of the analytic tradition.

Cheryl Misak offers a strikingly new view of the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, a belief that works. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more (Peirce) and less (James) objective ways. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore sa...

Cheryl Misak argues that truth ought to be reinstated to a central position in moral and political philosophy. She argues that the correct account of truth is one found in a certain kind of pragmatism: a true belief is one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument. This account is not only an improvement on the views of central figures such as Rawls and Habermas, but it can also make sense of the idea that, despite conflict, plura...

When he died in 1930 aged twenty-six, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set....

This volume examines the important but, until recently, forgotten work of the British analytic philosopher Margaret Macdonald. Macdonald's career spanned one of the most significant and fascinating periods in the history of analytic philosophy: the pre-war London of Susan Stebbing as she advanced philosophical analysis; the Cambridge of Ludwig Wittgenstein as he lectured on his new practice-centred philosophy; the Oxford of Gilbert Ryle and ordinary language philosophy; and the post-war Lo...

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is generally considered the most significant American philosopher. He was the founder of pragmatism, the view popularized by William James and John Dewey, that our philosophical theories must be linked to experience and practice. The essays in this volume reveal how Peirce worked through this idea to make important contributions to most branches of philosophy. The topics covered include Peirce's influence; the famous pragmatic maxim and the view of truth ...