The two pragmatisms

by H. O. Mounce

The Pragmatist tradition in philosophy has, through the work of Richard Rorty, recently achieved a status until now has not been accorded to its founder, Charles Sanders Peirce. Much of Peirce's work and his life has remained hidden and little explored, status instead lying with William James, who is known to have misinterpreted Peirce's work. The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty maps out the changing status and key ideas of the Pragmatist movement explaining the diverging paths of the 'Two Pragmatisms' from Peirce's pioneering work on the theory of signs, to Rorty's seminal writings on the 'mirror of nature'. The Realism of Peirce is contrasted with the anti-Realism that characterises much of the contemporary writing on Pragmatism. The work of Rorty in particular is used to explain the importance of Pragmatism today, in particular through his debt to Dewey, whom he has described as one of the three most important philosophers of the century.