DOCSLIB.ORG

A Resolution of Oliver Wendell Holmes

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Resolution of Oliver Wendell Holmes North Dakota Law Review Volume 83 Number 2 Article 3 1-1-2007 The Municipal Ideal and the Unknown End: A Resolution of Oliver Wendell Holmes Michael F. Duggan, Ph.D Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/ndlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Duggan,, Michael F. Ph.D (2007) "The Municipal Ideal and the Unknown End: A Resolution of Oliver Wendell Holmes," North Dakota Law Review: Vol. 83 : No. 2 , Article 3. Available at: https://commons.und.edu/ndlr/vol83/iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Dakota Law Review by an authorized editor of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE MUNICIPAL IDEAL AND THE UNKNOWN END: A RESOLUTION OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES * MICHAEL F. DUGGAN, PH.D. I think that the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction.1 If I were dying, my last words would be have faith and pursue the unknown end.2 I. INTRODUCTION: THE HOLMESIAN BIFURCATION: DARWIN, MALTHUS AND THE “MUNICIPAL IDEAL” The article on Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court frames a well-known tension in his thought that at first glance would seem impossible to reconcile.3 In fact, the underpinnings of *Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University; Library Assistant and Supervisor of Bench Aides at the Supreme Court of the United States. I would like to thank David Isenbergh, many of whose ideas helped shape this article. For their insightful comments on drafts of this paper, I thank Linda S. Maslow, Assistant Librarian for Research Services at the Supreme Court, Noah R. Feldman, and Robert Fabrikant. I also thank Nicholas Matlach for technical assistance. Those who write on Holmes tend to approach him from a philosophical perspective (or from the history of philosophy) or from the law (or legal history) or as a hybrid of these (e.g., legal philosophy). Although I discuss aspects of his legal thought below, my approach to Holmes is from philosophy—more analytical than continental—and from a perspective within the history of ideas. The practical lawyer who reads this may grow impatient by the lack of case citations and what may seem to be an excess of theoretical speculation. I think this sort of approach to a topic related to the law has the potential for both insights and pitfalls, and only hope that my article will prove to be satisfactory to the modern heirs of the practical attorneys to whom Holmes first read The Path of the Law, 110 years ago. 1. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, The Path of the Law, in THE ESSENTIAL HOLMES 102 (Richard A. Posner ed., Univ. of Chi. Press 1992). 2. Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Mr. Wu (Jan. 27, 1925), in JUSTICE HOLMES TO DR. WU: AN INTIMATE CORRESPONDENCE 1921-1932, at 24 (Central Book Co. 1947). 3. THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 410 (Kermit L. Hall ed., Oxford Univ. Press 1992). The relevant text reads: To Holmes, life was a continual clash for groups—nations, races, classes— representing great conflicting principles, struggling for survival in a world of limited resources. The Constitution required only that the domestic struggle be fair and peaceful. The tack of the judge was to choose fairly between contending forces. Political truth was to be worked out in the competition of the marketplace and not imposed by armies or police. The inconsistency in Holmes’s ideas of the judge’s role became more marked as he grew older. His Darwinist, quasi-scientific system called for judges to serve, in the 464 NORTH DAKOTA LAW REVIEW [VOL. 83:463 Holmes’s philosophy are based on an apparent bifurcation amounting to a powerful contradiction: On the one hand is his frequently stated belief in a harsh Darwinian or Malthusian naturalism, a respect for often coercive, external power and an amoral, pragmatic approach to the law. On the other hand, is a view of the law suggesting a commitment to duty, balance, fairness, reason and moderation.4 When we factor in Holmes’s affable personality, his verve, and his romantic approach to life with the latter mode, and the dark skepticism found in some of his letters with the former, this gap becomes even wider, the poles more incongruous. This dichotomy—seemingly exclusive to the point of self-negation—is the central problem with Holmes’s view of the law and of life. A born skeptic, Holmes’s general outlook was influenced by evolutionary theory and nineteenth century positivism.5 As a youth, he had a streak of idealistic rebelliousness, but his service in the Civil War transformed this into something harder.6 Although he never subscribed to end, the survival of their own class or nation. Yet in the chivalrous system of the law Holmes described, the judge must set aside his personal loyalties and views, deciding cases fairly even when that would mean death to the existing order. Holmes’s self-denying sense of duty, his loyalty to the future of humanity rather than its present order, apparently was founded on faith in something outside of the evolutionary system of law. It could not be reconciled with Holmes’s system and indeed seemed to contradict it. As he grew older, Holmes’s sense of duty came to predominate, so that his opinions seemed to be the impersonal voice of duty itself. 4. See id.; see also infra note 9 and accompanying text. 5. For an overview of Holmes’s philosophical influences, see PHILIP P. WIENER, EVOLUTION AND THE FOUNDERS OF PRAGMATISM 172-79 (Harvard Univ. Press 1949). See also Sheldon M. Novick, Holmes’s Philosophy and Jurisprudence: Origin and Development of Principal Themes, in 1 COLLECTED WORKS OF JUSTICE HOLMES: COMPLETE PUBLIC WRITINGS AND SELECTED JUDICIAL OPINIONS OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 18, 18-73 (Sheldon M. Novick ed., Univ. of Chic. Press 1995). Other insightful overviews of Holmes’s life and thought include DAVID H. BURTON, OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.: WHAT MANNER OF LIBERAL? (Robert E. Krieger Pub’g Co. 1979), and MAX LERNER, THE MIND AND FAITH OF JUSTICE HOLMES i-6 (Little, Brown & Co. 1943). 6. Neither Holmes’s skepticism nor his romanticism was the result of his experiences in the war, but both were altered and brought to maturity by it. In a letter to Morris Cohen dated February 5, 1919, Holmes claims to having inherited from his mother a “skeptical temperament.” Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Morris Cohen (Feb. 5, 1919), in THE ESSENTIAL HOLMES, supra note 1, at 110. He also mentions his early support of abolition and a belief in Emersonian Transcendentalism here. Id. The values Holmes embraced as a young man included chivalry, idealism, and an emerging belief in duty. Duty is what a person commits to and what guides his or her actions in situations with a lack of certainty. It is a commitment to grand strategy with only a tactical perspective. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Natural Law, in THE ESSENTIAL HOLMES, supra note 1, at 183. Holmes’s duty, therefore, is strangely like faith—a word that we must use in a qualified sense with him. Since Holmes believed that our knowledge of things is modest and incomplete, the virtues that he valued—loyalty, duty, courage, etiquette—were also modest and not deontological absolutes. They comprise a simple system of belief for a man who thought that anything more ambitious or optimistic was unfounded. For a discussion of this perspective, see Catherine Pierce 2007] A RESOLUTION OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 465 the undisciplined, wholesale evolutionism of Herbert Spencer or the vitalism of Hegel, he did believe that evolution could be meaningfully applied to the development of the law, which, along with the general growth of human knowledge, is among the few, non-biological spheres in which evolutionary explanations based on natural selection are appropriate.7 Holmes’s unsentimental view embraced the idea that the struggle for survival in nature was also a part of the human condition and therefore manifest in civilization at large. After all, people are a subset of nature and not the other way around. In spite of his bluster and didacticism characterizing adjudication as “playing the game by its rules,” and his dismissal of morality as etiquette— manners to ameliorate pure force—and nothing more objective than “the human point of view,”8 Holmes believed that some solutions in the law Wells, Old-Fashioned Postmodernism and the Legal Theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 63 BROOK. L. REV. 54, 59-85 (1997). In one of his occasional speeches, Holmes evoked a scene of a soldier’s grave in juxta- position to the activity of the thinking man of consequences. Both exist in the cosmos where “the truth of truth” is not certain, and both men are men of action in very different ways. Holmes’s Walbridge Abner Field Speech of November 25, 1899, in THE ESSENTIAL HOLMES, supra note 1, at 213. The soldier dies to help make the kind of world in which he would want to live. Likewise, the philosopher will never know if he was right, but acts nonetheless by advancing his ideas, “knowing that he could go no further.” Id. This would seem to be the basis of Holmes’s idea of an existential allegiance to duty to what one believes without knowing. And it is this commitment that defines much of his outlook.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • History and Genealogy of the Stackpole Family
    Jl o o o o HISTORY AND GENEALOGY OF THE STACKPOLE FAMILY BY EVERETT S. STACKPOLE SECOND EDITION 1920 a- . A THE WEF yn^^ PUBLIC J.,! BR A RV ' ux'-^:'^-e . ASTOB, LEN:*^ ^,;j 'TILDEK F ''DaHo..\:s| 1* Journal Printshop and Bindery Lewiston, Maine CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Origin "7 42 II. Stacpole Family in Ireland III. The Coat of Arms 52 IV. James Stacpole, the Emigrant 54 V. The Old Farm 65 VI. Second Generation 75 VII. Third Generation 87 VIII. Fourth Generation 95 IX. Fifth Generation 115 X. Sixth Generation 160 XI. Seventh Generation 264 XII. Eighth Generation 304 XIII. The Stackpoles of Pennsylvania 306 XIV. Later Arrivals 314 XV. Military Record 319 XVI. College Alumni 335 XVII. Reunions 337 Index 339 ILLUSTRATIONS The Stack Rock Frontispiece Stackpole Court Opposite page 10 Sir Richard de Stakepol 15 Church of Stackpole-Elidyr 21 Sir Elidyr de Stakepol 22 Wife of Sir Elidyr de Stakepol 22 The Eight-Arch Bridge . 29 Approach to Stackpole Court 38 Post Office at Stackpole, Wales 40 John Stacpoole of Cragbrien 47 Edenvale, Ennis, County Clare, Ireland 49 Coat of Arms 52 House of James Stacpole, 1680 58 The Old Farm 69 Stackpole Memorial 72 Where Our Ancestors Lived 74 William Stackpole 127 David Dunning Stackpole 140 Samuel Owen Stackpole 144 Lorenzo Stackpole 194 Annie W. Baer 194 Joseph Lewis Stackpole 205 John Ward Gurley Stackpole 207 William Stackpole 236 Rev. Charles Henry Stackpole 237 Everett S. Stackpole 239 Alice Aberdein 244 Nellie S. Stackpole 258 Charles Harper Stackpole 277 George Dallas Stackpole 278 Joseph Lewis Stackpole 295 Joseph Lewis Stackpole 296 George F.
    [Show full text]
  • The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College of The
    The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts CITIES AT WAR: UNION ARMY MOBILIZATION IN THE URBAN NORTHEAST, 1861-1865 A Dissertation in History by Timothy Justin Orr © 2010 Timothy Justin Orr Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2010 The dissertation of Timothy Justin Orr was reviewed and approved* by the following: Carol Reardon Professor of Military History Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Director of Graduate Studies in History Mark E. Neely, Jr. McCabe-Greer Professor in the American Civil War Era Matthew J. Restall Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women‘s Studies Carla J. Mulford Associate Professor of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT During the four years of the American Civil War, the twenty-three states that comprised the Union initiated one of the most unprecedented social transformations in U.S. History, mobilizing the Union Army. Strangely, scholars have yet to explore Civil War mobilization in a comprehensive way. Mobilization was a multi-tiered process whereby local communities organized, officered, armed, equipped, and fed soldiers before sending them to the front. It was a four-year progression that required the simultaneous participation of legislative action, military administration, benevolent voluntarism, and industrial productivity to function properly. Perhaps more than any other area of the North, cities most dramatically felt the affects of this transition to war. Generally, scholars have given areas of the urban North low marks. Statistics refute pessimistic conclusions; northern cities appeared to provide a higher percentage than the North as a whole.
    [Show full text]
  • T Camp Meigs, READVILLE, M.VM MASS
    CIVIL WAR CAMPS AT READVILLE CAMP MEIGS PLAYGROUND & FOWL MEADOW RESERVATION VoL. PRELIMINARY HISTORIC DATA COMPILATION Cant oF t Camp Meigs, READVILLE, M.VM MASS. Sr 0 47c r i )1; CULTURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PROGRANI W. A. Stokinger A. K. Schroeder Captain A. A. Swanson RESERVATIONS & HISTORIC SITES METROPOLITAN DISTRICT COMMISSION 20 SOMERSET STREET BOSTON MASSACHUSETTS April 1990 ABSTRACT Camp Meigs or the Camp at Readville was the most heavily used of the approximately thirty-nine Civil War training grounds established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the processing of Massachusetts Volunteer Militia (MVM) troops for induction into Federal service. Situated adjacent to the Neponset river on a site historically used for militia musters in what was the town of Dedham (now Hyde Park), a camp of rendezvous was first founded near the Readville railroad junction in July 1861 and remained in active service through early 1866. This camp supported over time the Commonwealth's primary training cantonment and a general hospital. During those Civil War years the Readville camps processed and trained at least 29,000 of the 114,000 men who served in the units raised by the Commonwealth. Thus, approximately a quarter of all men serving under Massachusetts state colors passed through Readville on their way to war. Preliminary research also indicates that of the 135 discrete, independently operating MVM organizations sanctioned and trained by the Commonwealth, Readville's graduates were allocated into at least 54 units, or forty percent of all MVM establishments, comprising: Nineteen of the Commonwealth's sixty-six camp trained MVM Infantry regiments.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Complexity of Ideas in America: Origins and Achievements of the Classical Age of Pragmatism Review Essays Edward A
    digitalcommons.nyls.edu Faculty Scholarship Articles & Chapters 2002 On the Complexity of Ideas in America: Origins and Achievements of the Classical Age of Pragmatism Review Essays Edward A. Purcell Jr. New York Law School Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_articles_chapters Recommended Citation 27 Law & Soc. Inquiry 967 (2002) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at DigitalCommons@NYLS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles & Chapters by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@NYLS. On the Complexity of "Ideas in America": Origins and Achievements of the Classical Age of Pragmatism Edward A. Purcell Jr. Louis MENAND. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001. Pp. 546. $27.00. Few historians would disagree with the claim that the events surround- ing the Civil War marked a decisive break in American national develop- ment, and few would deny that a major component of that break was the elaboration and spread of new ideas and attitudes about matters of the most fundamental importance: law, nature, science, religion, politics, psychology, philosophy, and social organization itself. In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand reexamines the roots of those intellectual changes, their evolution through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their long-term significance in American life and thought. "The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it," he writes. "It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking that would help people cope with the conditions of modem life." Among its effects, that new culture and new way of thinking profoundly reshaped American views of law and the legal system.
    [Show full text]
  • Lexington, Ky.), 96:55–58 Abraham Lincoln, Contemporary: an Abbey, M
    Index A Herman Belz: reviewed, 96:201–3 A&M College (Lexington, Ky.), 96:55–58 Abraham Lincoln, Contemporary: An Abbey, M. E., 93:289 American Legacy, edited by Frank J. Abbot, W. W.: ed., The Papers of George Williams and William D. Pederson: Washington: Confederation Series, Vol. reviewed, 94:182–83 4: April 1786—January 1787, reviewed, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of 94:183–84 Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Abbott, Augustus H., 97:270 Diplomacy of the Civil War, by Howard Abbott, Dorothy: Thomas D. Clark letter Jones: reviewed, 98:431–32 to, 103:400 Abraham Lincoln and the American Abbott, Edith, 93:32 Political Tradition, edited by John L. Abbott, Grace, 93:32 Thomas: reviewed, 85:181–83 Abbott, H. P. Almon, 90:281 Abraham Lincoln and the Quakers, by Abbott, Richard H.: For Free Press and Daniel Bassuk: noted, 86:99 Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in Abraham Lincoln and the Second the Reconstruction South, reviewed, American Revolution, by James M. 103:803–5; The Republican Party and McPherson: reviewed, 89:411–12 the South, reviewed, 85:89–91 Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait, edited Abercrombie, Mary, 90:252 by Herbert Mitgang: noted, 88:490 Abernathy, Jeff: To Hell and Back: Race Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker, by and Betrayal in the American Novel, Waldo W. Braden: reviewed, 87:457–58 reviewed, 101:558–60 Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, by Abernathy, Ralph David, 99:29 Allen C. Guelzo: reviewed, 98:429–34 Abernethy, Thomas, 91:299 Abraham Lincoln: Sources and Style of Abiding Faith: A Sesquicentennial History Leadership, edited by Frank J.
    [Show full text]
  • Civil War 150 Reader 3
    CIVIL WAR 150 • READER #3 The EXPERIENCE of BATTLE Contents Introduction by Brooks D. Simpson Introduction by Brooks D. Simpson . 3 William T. Sherman to Ellen Ewing Sherman, July 28 , 1861 . 6 Henry Livermore Abbott to Josiah Gardner Abbott, October 22 , 1861 . 12 Lunsford P. Yandell Jr. to Lunsford Yandell Sr., November 10 , 1861 . 17 John Kennerly Farris to Mary Farris, October 31 , 1862 . 22 George W. Dawson to Laura Amanda Dawson, April 26 , 1862 . 29 Charles B. Haydon: Journal, June 25 –July 1 , 1862 . 32 David L. Thompson: With Burnside at Antietam . 41 Ephraim Anderson: from Memoirs: Historical CIVIL WAR ?C>: Exploring the War and Its and Personal . 49 Meaning Through the Words of Those Who Lived It Charles B. Labruzan: Journal, is a national public programing initiative designed to encourage October 4, 1862 . 53 public exploration of the transformative impact and contested meanings Henry Livermore Abbott to Josiah Gardner Abbott, of the Civil War through primary documents and firsthand accounts. December 14 , 1862, and to George B. Perry, December 17 , 1862 . 57 Biographical Notes . 61 The project is presented by Chronology . 64 The Library of America Questions for Discussion . 67 in partnership with and is supported by a grant from Introduction Introduction, headnotes, and back matter copyright © 2012 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. Cover photograph: “Soldiers in trenches before battle,” Petersburg, Virginia, 1865. THE EXPERIENCE OF BATTLE Courtesy of the National Archives. William T. Sherman: Copyright © 1999 The University of North Carolina Press. here was no single reason why men chose to go to war in John Kennerly Farris: Copyright © 1994 by The Franklin County Historical T1861 .
    [Show full text]
  • American Pragmatism Attempts to Undo—Through Critique, Synthesis, and Occasional Silence— Entrenched Philosophical Distinctions Such As: (1) Rationalism Vs
    Philosophy 112: American Philosophy Instructor: Professor Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther Classroom: Cowell 134 Course Meeting Times: MWF 3:30 – 4:40 pm Office: Cowell A-104 Phone: 459-5648 Office Hours: WF 2-3 pm, and by appointment Email: [email protected] (the class will also be on eCommons) COURSE INTRODUCTION (1) Content American Pragmatism attempts to undo—through critique, synthesis, and occasional silence— entrenched philosophical distinctions such as: (1) rationalism vs. empiricism, (2) theory vs. practice, (3) fact vs. value, (4) abstract vs. concrete, (5) mind vs. body, etc. Moreover, pragmatism critiques (a) relying on the a priori, (b) separating philosophical, scientific, and everyday reasoning, and (c) reifying abstract philosophical systems. Pragmatic philosophical analysis focuses on concrete consequences, as well as on social and ethical context. Relevance and consequences, dialogue and democracy, and continuity and anti-essentialism are the order of the day. Above all else, this class examines how philosophy is relevant to your own lived experience. Philosophy 112 explores pragmatic themes in the work of classic and contemporary American philosophers. You will read influential papers and book chapters by (1) three classic pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey and (2) two neo- pragmatists, Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty, and (3) critics, old and new, of pragmatism, including Bertrand Russell and Paul Boghossian. The context of pragmatism is described in a lively book by Louis Menand, The Metaphysical
    [Show full text]
  • The Metaphysical Club at the Johns Hopkins University (1879–1885)
    History of Psychology Copyright 2005 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2005, Vol. 8, No. 4, 331–346 1093-4510/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1093-4510.8.4.331 THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY (1879–1885) Peter J. Behrens The Pennsylvania State University Of the earliest American universities, The Johns Hopkins in Baltimore holds a unique position for psychology. At Hopkins, many of America’s first psychologists received their graduate training. Of special interest is the Hopkins Metaphysical Club, organized in 1879 by Charles Sanders Peirce. It provided a forum for research and scholarship by faculty and students. Papers related to topics of the “new” psychology began to appear in 1883, about the time G. Stanley Hall was given a 3-year appointment at Hopkins. When Peirce departed Hopkins in 1885, Hall was free to develop psychology in his image and disbanded the club. Nevertheless, the Metaphysical Club played an important role in the emergence of American scientific psychology. Widely understood among historians of psychology is the fact that The Johns Hopkins University played a significant role in the development of American psychology. G. Stanley Hall held the position as the first full-time professor of psychology, when he was appointed professor of psychology and pedagogics at Hopkins in 1883; Hopkins’ graduates were among the first generation of psy- chologists in America, which included John Dewey, James McKeen Cattell, Christine Ladd, and Joseph Jastrow; and Hopkins was an inspiration to, if not a model for, other American universities for graduate education with its emphasis on laboratory research, the seminar, and academic freedom (Veysey, 1965).
    [Show full text]
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
    Essential Civil War Curriculum | Susan-Mary Grant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | November 2014 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. By Susan-Mary Grant, Newcastle University Resources If you can read only one book Author Title. City: Publisher, Year. Grant, Susan-Mary Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Civil War Soldier, Supreme Court Justice. New York: Routledge, 2015. Books and Articles Author Title. City: Publisher, Year. Adams, Michael C. C. Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Baker, Liva The Justice From Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes. (New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Duncan, Russell, ed. Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Eicher, David J. The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Gallagher, Gary The Union War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Howe, Mark DeWolfe Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957-63. Essential Civil War Curriculum | Copyright 2014 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech Page 1 of 3 Essential Civil War Curriculum | Susan-Mary Grant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | November 2014 Lerner, Max, ed. The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943. Menand, Louis The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. Miller, Richard F. Harvard’s Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005.
    [Show full text]
  • An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott Rebekah N
    Volume 12 Article 4 2013 “To Think of the ubjecS t Unmans Me:” An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott Rebekah N. Oakes Gettysburg College Class of 2013 Follow this and additional works at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj Part of the United States History Commons Share feedback about the accessibility of this item. Oakes, Rebekah N. (2013) "“To Think of the ubjS ect Unmans Me:” An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott," The Gettysburg Historical Journal: Vol. 12 , Article 4. Available at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj/vol12/iss1/4 This open access article is brought to you by The uC pola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of The uC pola. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “To Think of the ubjecS t Unmans Me:” An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott Abstract “‘To think of the subject unmans me:’ An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott,” explores the challenges to both the Victorian ideals of manliness and the culture of death presented by the American Civil War. The letters of Henry Abbott, a young officer serving with the 20th Massachusetts, display the tension between his upper class New England world in which gentleman were to operate within an ideal of emotional control and sentimentality, and his new existence on the ground level of the Army of the Potomac. After the death of his brother, this tension initially caused him to suppress his grief for fear of being “unmanned” in front of his fellow soldiers.
    [Show full text]
  • Science and Pragmatism
    Science and Pragmatism AN INTRODUCTION Frank X. Ryan Chauncey Wright, Charles S. Peirce, and William James were the hearth and heart of the original Metaphysical Club. Their philosophical agility shaped the legacy that would solidify pragmatism as America’s most significant contribution to philosophy. The essays and reviews anthologized here not only unearth the foundation of this revolu- tionary worldview, but also offer a personal glimpse of three lifelong friends whose disagree- ments are as insightful as their shared commitment to a philosophy of action, problem solving, and experimentalism. CHAUNCEY WRIGHT AND THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS Chauncey Wright (1830–1875) was a popular fixture at the many informal discussion groups that sprang up in Cambridge in the 1850s and 1860s. Wright’s writings are often ponderous, and his few attempts at academic teaching ended in failure. He struggled to support himself as a computer tallying lengthily figures. Awkward and shy in most public settings, among close friends he blossomed into the “Local Socrates” who “lived for conversation.”1 Wright met Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) at one such group in 1857, the first of “a thousand close disputations” preceding the formation of the Metaphysical Club.2 Wright was one of the few interlocutors Peirce considered his intellectual equal—a “boxing master” whom the younger philosopher frequently faced “to be severely pummeled.”3 Wright’s enthusiasm for Peirce’s emerging philosophy is evident in a published comment about the latter’s 1871 review of A. C. Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley. Peirce had been teasing an eclectic reading of scholastic realism and Kant into a rebuke of rationalism and nominalistic realism.
    [Show full text]
  • American Philosophy (Philosophy 2314, Section 001) Course Description Philosophy Occupies a Curious Position in American Intellectual Life
    Fall 2012 Mark Phillips TTh 11-12:15 Office: LA 391 Office Phone: 280-6659 Hours: by appointment [email protected] American Philosophy (Philosophy 2314, Section 001) Course Description Philosophy occupies a curious position in American intellectual life. Unlike in Europe, where the study of philosophy has traditionally been held in high regard, Americans either avoid many of the issues considered perennial in the history of philosophy or adopt other means of dealing with them. This has resulted in an eclectic mix of cultural traditions, religious practices, and contemporary pop ideologies. In the United States, the term “philosophy” might refer to the analytic tradition of Britain, the Continental influences existentialism or postmodernism, holistic views imported from the East, or apologies for Western Christianity. Unlike more conventional approaches, which aim to establish which philosophy is the correct one, American philosophies aim more and more at establishing ways of talking that are successful for various purposes. As a result, a large part of American Philosophy involves what Cornel West has called an “evasion of philosophy,” an avoidance of the traditional problems of metaphysics and epistemology. The most distinguishing feature of American Philosophy is its attempt to move away from claims about truth, in favor of talk about what works, and why it works. Its most prominent figures – Peirce, James, Dewey, and Rorty – comprise a “school” of thought known as Pragmatism, and represent a shift away from thinking about thought as correspondence to reality and toward thinking of it as simply a way of coping with the contingencies of our environment. For that reason, this course will focus on what distinguishes American Philosophy from its (primarily) European heritage, so that we will be mostly concerned with the American pragmatist movement of the last century or so.
    [Show full text]