Pragmatism in Florence: the Magicians and the Logicians

Chapter 1 Pragmatism in Florence: The Magicians and the Logicians

Cornelis de Waal

As, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anar- chy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra- rationalist minds in philosophy. William James

Pragmatism is often seen as America’s contribution to world philosophy. It emerged in the early 1870s when a small group of young men from Cambridge, Massachusetts, came together to discuss philosophy. With an ironic and defi- ant air, they called themselves—in honour of a discipline they considered obsolete—The Metaphysical Club. No records of their meetings survive, but from correspondence and publications it is clear that they rejected philosophy as it was practiced at the time. The group included, among others, William James (1842–1910), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), and the future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935). At a pivotal moment their discussions centered around Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as “that upon which a man is prepared to act.” As Peirce later recalled, once that definition is granted, pragmatism follows almost immediately. In the eyes of both Peirce and James, who became the first major proponents of this philosophical out- look, pragmatism was not some revolutionary new approach, but was merely the conscious and systematic adoption of a method that philosophers had been practicing from antiquity onward. Peirce boldly declared that the new- ness of a philosophical idea is one of the surest signs that it is false, and he called even Jesus a pragmatist. James sought to drive home this same point when he subtitled his famous book Pragmatism as “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.” Despite the pragmatists’ claim that philosophers have always been practicing pragmatism, its explicit enunciation as a method for doing philosophy by James, Peirce, and others got a cold reception in Europe, where it was seen as designed for people who have little patience for philosophy and who prefer to stick to practical affairs. That pragmatism originated in America, a country that was known for action but not for thought, further strengthened their prej- udice and James’ painfully successful metaphor—that truth is merely the cash

18 de Waal value of our ideas—was pretty much the nail that closed the coffin; it enabled European philosophers to dismiss pragmatism as a product of crass American capitalism and its apology. All this notwithstanding, similar tendencies had developed independently in Europe, and at the beginning of the twentieth century some of their proponents found in American pragmatism a worthy ally. Before discussing what is without a doubt the most vibrant European contribution to pragmatism, that of the Florentine pragmatists, I will sketch briefly the main tenets of the views of Peirce and James and look at a few early European allies that proved influ- ential to the classical pragmatists in Italy, most notably F.C.S. Schiller, Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, and Georges Sorel. After this I continue with a brief synopsis of the main views of the Florentine pragmatists and the movement’s main mouthpiece, the journal Leonardo, before discussing its two main cur- rents: the James–Schiller inspired magical pragmatism of Papini and Prezzo- lini and the logical pragmatism of Vailati and Calderoni, which has a distinctly Peircean slant. I conclude with an account of the Prezzolini–Calderoni debate, a debate that was nearing its peak when William James visited Rome to attend the Fifth International Congress of Psychology in 1905.

1 The Origin and Development of Pragmatism in America

Broadly conceived, pragmatism denies that we can separate theory from prac- tice, thought from action. On its narrow interpretation—held most prominently by Peirce—pragmatism is solely a criterion of meaning, a technique for making our ideas clear. In its wider interpretation, held for instance by James and Schiller, pragmatism is not only a theory of meaning but also, and more prominently, a theory of truth. For Peirce, as we shall see shortly, pragmatism is not a theory of truth but, to the extent that any conception of truth must pass muster with his pragmatic criterion of meaning, implies a theory of truth. The official birthplace of pragmatism, if we can say that there is such a thing, is a series of six papers that Peirce published in the late 1870s in Popular Science Monthly under the umbrella “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.”1 In the second paper, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce introduced what is now called the pragmatic maxim:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of

1 See de Waal (2014).