ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century, American pragmatism arrived on the European philosophical scene, yet the story is more complicated than the dominant narrative has for a long time suggested. The earliest encounter of future logical empiricists with pragmatism—largely neglected until recent scholarship—focused mainly on William James’s views rather than on Charles S. Peirce’s or John Dewey’s. The later convergence between the Viennese supporters of the “scientific world-conception” and pragmatist philosophers (such as Charles Morris), which has been usually depicted by the protagonists themselves as a decisive event for logical empiricism, represents only one part of the history of the relations between the two movements. The story rather begins in Vienna, long before the intellectual migration of European philosophy of science in the 1930s. This chapter shows how this early reception influenced the later views on pragmatism within the Vienna Circle.
