Philosophical Pragmatism

provide to keep things jointly or apart, are just as genuine as the things themselves. His pragmatic philosophy was more built up by the American philosopher John Dewey and others.

Holmes himself is an instance of a man who began as an Emersonian Idealist and pursued the natural trajectory of this discipline into behaviorism. The midpoint on the voyage is the viewpoint of pragmatism, and Holmes was there at the formation. After the Civil War, he was an associate of the Metaphysical Club, which included both William James and Charles Peirce, the latter usually considered as the father of pragmatism. In spirit, pragmatism is just another type of idealism. A “problem,” in the pragmatist scheme of things, is just the observation of some absurdity. If you arrange substances so that you no longer have this discernment, then the difficulty is solved. If the new understanding does not match to your system of logic, then there is something incorrect with your system. The nonstop effect of Peirce on Holmes has been much discussed, and some writers have almost certainly overstated it. Still, the philosophy of “The Common Law” is pragmatic in the severe logic. The common law is not a set body of policies and the syllogisms resulting from them, but an unrefined structure that has come up in reaction to “the felt necessities of the time.” The method to assess a law is to gauge the extent of subjective fulfillment it gives the community. By the point of his essay “The Path of the Law,” published in 1885, he had finished the development to a behaviorist theory of law. Whatsoever you may believe of Holmes’s jurisprudence, “The Path of the Law” is an unmistakably great implement in legal philosophy; certainly it endures the test of time much more than

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