ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on 19th-century philosopher – William James. In his most famous work, the series of lectures published as Pragmatism, James begins by distinguishing between two human temperaments: the tough-minded and the tender-minded. James believes that pragmatism is a method that reconciles these opposing temperaments. Borrowing from Peirce, James develops pragmatism as “a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.” Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved.
