Abstract

As the title of this essay indicates, my concern will be with the ways in which pragmatism is a unique metaphysical tradition. This is something I have written about before,1 but in many quarters the idea still persists that pragmatism must be either the denial 2 that there is such a thing as an objectively warranted idea; or, on the other hand, just an outdated early twentieth century American movement with no real importance today. To show that it is neither of these, I propose to compare pragmatism with, on the one hand, the materialism or "naturalism" which dominates the thinking of most analytic philosophers who do metaphysics and epistemology today, and, on the other hand, the traditional understanding of what "metaphysics" is supposed to be. At the conclusion of this essay I shall also say a few words about the respects in which pragmatism also differs from European existentialism, a movement which shares pragmatism's aspiration to break loose from the traditional project of metaphysics, without 3 falling into relativism or nihilism