Most Famous Pragmatism Philosophers

Pragmatism is the most distinctive philosophical tradition to emerge from the United States, founded in the late 19th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Its central commitment is that the meaning of an idea consists in its practical consequences and that truth is best understood in terms of what works in inquiry and action rather than as correspondence to an independent reality. The classical pragmatists made significant contributions across logic, semiotics, ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and educational theory. Pragmatism declined in mid-20th-century academic philosophy but was substantially revived in the late 20th century through the work of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others. It continues to be one of the major streams of contemporary philosophy.

Philosophers in this tradition

Cornel West b. 1953 · American
Cornel West is an American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual whose work brings together pragmatism, the African-American intellectual tradition, and prophetic Chr...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 – 1935 · American
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, philosopher, novelist, and one of the leading feminist theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wome...
Jane Addams 1860 – 1935 · American
Jane Addams was an American social philosopher, reformer, and pacifist and the most influential American woman public intellectual of her generation. In 1889 she co-founded Hull...
Hilary Putnam 1926 – 2016 · American
Hilary Putnam was an American philosopher and one of the central figures of late twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Over a long career at Harvard he made foundational contri...
William James 1842 – 1910 · American
William James was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher and psychologist, one of the founders of pragmatism and a central figure in the early development of modern ...
Charles Sanders Peirce 1839 – 1914 · American
Charles Sanders Peirce was a 19th and early 20th-century American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, regarded as the founder of pragmatism and one of the most ...
George Santayana 1863 – 1952 · Spanish-American
George Santayana was a Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Educated at Harvard alongside William James and Josiah Royce, he taught there for more th...
John Dewey 1859 – 1952 · American
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, the most influential figure of the second generation of pragmatist philosophy and one of the most...
Richard Rorty 1931 – 2007 · American
Richard Rorty was an American philosopher who began in the analytic tradition and gradually became its most celebrated internal critic. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature d...
Sidney Hook 1902 – 1989 · American
Sidney Hook was an American philosopher, long-time professor at New York University, and one of the most prominent American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. A pupi...
Anna Julia Cooper 1858 – 1964 · American
Anna Julia Cooper was an American philosopher, educator, and one of the founding voices of African-American feminist thought, the fourth African-American woman to receive a doct...
Susan Haack b. 1945 · British-American
Susan Haack is a British-American philosopher, distinguished professor at the University of Miami, and one of the leading defenders of pragmatism and epistemological responsibil...
Susanne Langer 1895 – 1985 · American
Susanne Knauth Langer was an American philosopher of mind, art, and language and one of the first women to achieve a major reputation in twentieth-century American philosophy. A...
W. E. B. Du Bois 1868 – 1963 · American
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, philosopher, historian, and civil rights leader. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he pr...
C. I. Lewis 1883 – 1964 · American
Clarence Irving Lewis was an American philosopher and the principal figure of the third generation of American pragmatism. A long-serving professor at Harvard, he made foundatio...
George Herbert Mead 1863 – 1931 · American
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist and one of the central figures of classical American pragmatism. A colleague of John Dewey at Chic...
Josiah Royce 1855 – 1916 · American
Josiah Royce was an American philosopher and the principal American defender of objective idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A colleague of William J...
Mary Whiton Calkins 1863 – 1930 · American
Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist and the first woman elected president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophi...
Hu Shi 1891 – 1962 · Chinese
Hu Shi was a Chinese philosopher, essayist, and diplomat, and a leader of the May Fourth and New Culture movements. After completing his doctorate under John Dewey at Columbia, ...
F. C. S. Schiller 1864 – 1937 · British
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller was a British philosopher of pragmatism, holding for many years a fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He gave pragmatism the alternati...
Alain Locke 1885 – 1954 · American
Alain LeRoy Locke was an American philosopher, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, and the principal philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. After graduate studies at Oxfo...
Mordecai Kaplan 1881 – 1983 · Lithuanian-American
Mordecai Kaplan was a Lithuanian-born American Jewish philosopher and rabbi, long associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the founder of Reconstructionis...
Robert Brandom b. 1950 · American
Robert Brandom is an American analytic philosopher, distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the most influential contemporary defenders of inferentia...