"It's kind of a history of pragmatic philosophy in the USA, how this came about after the Civil War; and it covers this guy whose name I can't remember, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William James. So it covers those four guys and how they were in this club, basically just one of those Victorian kind of - "let's have cigars and brandy and talk about philosophy." They called themselves the Metaphysical Club, kind of ironically 'cause of them were very metaphysical.

Yeah, it was very, very interesting how the idea that this America spin on philosophy, so it moved away from ethics and into the idea that philosophy is affected by the world and can have an effect on the world. It's not just something that's isolated on campuses, and it can be used as a practical thing. That's kind of putting a simplistic spin on it, but that's basically what pragmatics believed.

Darwin sort of affected all of this. Darwinism became in the hands of capitalists and also well meaning progressives - "progressives" meant something kind of different back then - turned into social Darwinism. But the idea of survival of the fittest is that like - well, if you're gonna survive, you have to be fit, and we should probably weed out those people who aren't fit. It led to all sorts of unfortunate things, including fascism.

It gets a little dense, kind of follow the philosophy. I'd give this book four out of five stars."

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