'Joan Richardson's book is nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of pragmatism. Pragmatism has been understood as rooted in a specifically American experience; it has also been understood to change the way we think about language. Richardson has welded these two interpretations of pragmatism into a single stunning insight. Her book will change the way you think about ... Read morethe history and meaning of pragmatism, and it will change the way you think about the history and meaning of American literature, too.' Louis Menand 'With impressive intellectual range and literary finesse, Joan Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism proposes that the evolution of Pragmatism - out of the settlers' religion and the experience of the new continent and out of the Darwinian event - into the dominant philosophy of the new nation exemplifies the evolutionary development of thinking within Pragmatism itself. Even one who sees an Emersonian current in American thinking that rather contests than confirms the pragmatist progression recognizes that Richardson's deployment of her material by reference to evolutionary biology and neuroscience presents a formidable charge against this oppositional sense of our philosophical temperament.' Stanley Cavell Show Less