ABSTRACT
American Pragmatism began with the philosophical explorations of Charles Sanders Peirce and has taken several historical forms which are not always compatible. A pragmatist does not accept the categories as a priori metaphysical principles, like Aristotelian or Kantian categories, but considers them as falsifiable metaphysical hypothesis. Peirce's metaphysics categorizes reality into possibility, actuality, and generality. Peirce believed that philosophy since the sixteenth century succumbed to nominalism, including James's interpretation of pragmatism, and Gelpi argues for the inadequacy of Whitehead's process philosophy because of its nominalism. Nominalism emerged in medieval philosophy as a speculative alternative to Platonic realism. In The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Sang Hyun Lee traces Jonathan Edwards understanding of habit, that is, tendency, back to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hume. Donald Gelpi provides a unified metaphysical foundation for his theological anthropology of the self as an emerging collection of tendencies created by a person's experiences and decisions.
