PRAGMATISM • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Pragmatism

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/prˈægmətˌɪzəm/ Listen

Pragmatism

noun

(philosophy) the doctrine that practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge and meaning and value.

The attribute of accepting the facts of life and favoring practicality and literal truth. Synonym: realism.

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Etymology of 'Pragmatism'

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"Pragmatism" Quotes from Famous Books

... is the relation of the philosophy of the complex vision to that modern tendency of thought which calls itself "pragmatism" and which also finds in personality its starting-point and centre? The philosophy of the complex vision seems to detect in the pragmatic attitude something which is profoundly unpleasing to its taste. Its own view of the art of life is that it is before everything ...

— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... things clearer as time went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense—which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word "Realists." They believed classes ...

— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... fact, his only reaction to a low, clear-cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to whether any rap would have actual existence without an ear there to hear it. He fancied he was verging more and more toward pragmatism. But at that moment, though he did not know it, he was verging with astounding ...

— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... knowledge are here exceeded: one may know in what way Herbart (who never arrived at an "arrangement of ideas") would discover his "naive realism." One may even know the degree to which the modern pragmatism of James and Schiller and others would find the bounds of "true presentments" transgressed—those presentments which we are able to make our own, to vindicate, enforce, ...

— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

Words linked to "Pragmatism" : philosophical doctrine, practicality, philosophy, instrumentalism, realism, pragmatical, philosophical theory, pragmatist, pragmatic