"Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James's prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James s now famous little essay on " The Will to Believe " the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading."
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Philosophers from the United StatesUniversity of Pennsylvania alumniUniversity of Pennsylvania faculty
Original Language: English
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p. 217-18; : Partly cited in: John Barton, "Pragmatism, systems thinking and system dynamics." 19th International System Dynamics Conference, Wellington, New Zealand. AusAID, 1999.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edgar_A._Singer%2C_Jr.
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Edgar A. Singer, Jr.
Edgar Arthur Singer, Jr. (November 13, 1873 – April 4, 1954) was an American philosopher, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and proponent of .
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