Abstract

It is a relatively rare, and very welcome, event when an original, brilliantly imaginative analytic philosopher takes a fresh look at earlier figures in the history of philosophy and proceeds to tell a story that ties in their work with his own. Analytic philosophy’s greatest disability remains its lack of historical resonance, and Hilary Putnam is one of the few who have worked hard to help it overcome this handicap. His discussion of the great American pragmatists has made it possible for students to see past the dismissive attitudes that Russell and Ayer, for example, adopted toward James and Dewey. Advancing along lines sketched out some decades ago in Morton White’s prescient Toward Reunion in Philosophy, Putnam has helped us see in detail how Quinean skepticism about the language-fact and essence-accident dualisms ties in with James’s and Dewey’s skepticism about many other traditional dualisms.