Introduction

Carrying on an intellectual tradition is a Janus-faced enterprise. Like Janus, the Roman god of transitions, one must look both forward and backward. Living by the Janus rule means one must keep the themes and insights of pragmatism’s genesis and development fresh and relevant, yet one must also find new avenues for applying and revising those commitments. Pragmatism, the retrenchers contend, is strictly the set of philosophical ideas found in those formative thinkers’ works and in the works of those who devote themselves to interpreting and restating what they said. Retrenchment’s companion is a historical story according to which pragmatism proper was abandoned or “eclipsed” in the mid-20th century by the philosophical idiom of analytic philosophy that prevails to this day in the English-speaking world.