The Metaphysical Club was a name attributed by the philosopher

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss (philosopher), Paul ...

, in an unpublished paper over thirty years after its foundation, to a conversational philosophical club that Peirce, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the philosopher and psychologist

William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th c ...

, amongst others, formed in January 1872 in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

, and dissolved in December 1872. Other members of the club included Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner. Within the philosophical discussions of the original club,

pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics� ...

is said by Peirce to have been born. The name of the 1872 club was chosen "half-ironically, half-defiantly," according to Peirce, as the group rejected the radical foundationalist European metaphysics in favor of a moderate foundationalism, pursued critical thinking of a pragmatic and positivist nature. However there is in fact no record of a club of this name in the writings of any of its members apart from Peirce, at the time or later, although

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

mentioned in a letter that his brother had joined "a metaphysical club." Upon Peirce's arrival at

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

in 1879, he founded a conversation club there which was definitively named The Metaphysical Club, open to faculty members and graduate students. Amongst its members was

John Dewey John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and Education reform, educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overridi ...

. The name ''The Metaphysial Club'' was adopted by

Louis Menand Louis Menand (; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book '' The Metaphysical Club'' (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America. Life ...

for his 2001 book, '' The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America'', covering American philosophical thought in the second half of the nineteenth century and covering the ideas and lives of many of the members of Peirce's circles in Cambridge and in Johns Hopkins.Menand (2001)

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* Menand, Louis, ''The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America'' (2001), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (hardcover), (paperback)

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Further reading