In my Pragmatism course, I spend a week on the transcendentalists before getting to pragmatism as such. Setting things up this time, I realized that I’m still using the PDF of Theodore Parker’s “Transcendentalism” lecture which I scanned back in 2003. It’s not pretty. Since the essay is in the public domain, there should be something better. So I started from the OCR text, cleaned it up, set it up in LaTeX, and generated a nice PDF.
I have posted it as part of my repository of free texts in pragmatism and American philosophy.
Another recent addition is the third of Peirce’s Popular Science essays, “The Doctrine of Chances”. It is common to just assign the first two essays (“Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”), and nicely formatted electronic versions of those are ubiquitous.1
- Approaching the course this time, I think that the contrast between Peirce and James will be made especially clear by having “The Doctrine of Chances” in mind when we discuss “The Will to Believe”. For Peirce, logic requires that we commit ourselves to the community and the long run. For James, we each have the right to take a chance on truth just for ourselves.