Introduction

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Notes

¹‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ [1878], in Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.402 [references by volume and paragraph number]. This is only one of several formulations that Peirce provides of the maxim: for further discussion, see Hookway, The Pragmatic Maxim.

²Cf. Kenna, ‘Ten Unpublished Letters from William James’, 309–331, and Perry, The Thought of William James, vol. 2, 485–493, 637–644.

³Cf. Peirce's comment that ‘My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume' (Collected Papers, 1.42), and that his critical commonsensism was ‘but a modification of Kantism' (Collected Papers, 5.452). Peirce also remarks on Kant's influence on his formulation of the pragmatic maxim itself, commenting that he ‘was led to the maxim by reflection on Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason' (Collected Papers, 5.3; cf. also 6.490).

⁴See for example Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity.

⁵This publication is part of the ‘Idealism and Pragmatism’ project which aims to consider the issue more widely: see http://idealismandpragmatism.org. It grew out of a conference on the historical connections between idealism and pragmatism, held in Sheffield in October 2013. Two other papers from the Sheffield conference are to be published elsewhere: Gava, ‘What is Wrong with Intuitions?’ and Westphal, ‘Hegel's Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction'.

⁶Gava and Stern (eds), Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy.

⁷Cf. Fichte, ‘First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge', 14–15; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, 433–434: ‘Hence the choice [between idealism and dogmatism] is governed by caprice, and since even a capricious decision must have some source, it is governed by inclination and interest. The ultimate basis of the difference between idealists and dogmatists is thus the difference of their interests’. And cf. James, Pragmatism, in 1975–88, vol. 1, 11: ‘The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’.

⁸For a bibliography, see http://idealismandpragmatism.org/bibliography.

⁹I am grateful to Chris Hookway for his help with the project and conference on which this publication is based, and for his encouragement more generally. I am also grateful for the support and advice of Mike Beaney as editor of the BJHP. Thanks are also due to all the contributors.