Reddit reviews The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

For pure enjoyment, I found The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand to be a great read. The subject matter (the birth of pragmatism as an American philosophical movement) may sound a little boring, but the book is motivated by a small cast of important characters, and gives an interesting view of an important time in Americas intellectual history. I couldn't put it down.

Louis Menand writes for The New Yorker regularly. He can come off as a bit of a snobbish prick in his essays, but he is a damn good writer and The Metaphysical Club is a masterpiece in my opinion.

While I haven't read this lately, if you're looking for some quality non-fiction I highly recommend The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand

Assuming journalistic "pop" books are acceptable, you might like the excellent The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand, which traces the evolution of the uniquely American 19th-century school of thought called Pragmatism that had a significant influence on philosophy, U.S. legal thinking, and the then-nascent social sciences.

That's just the "boys are going to be boys" defense. My point is that the iconography is white-caucasian ethnocentric and grounded in racist tropes. Sure there were dark-skinned prehistoric humans but outside of "Clan of the Cave Bear" those have been rarely represented in popular media. Skin color has long been used to indicate "primitiveness". What's more: Agassiz (we have a boat name after him) believed in phrenology and that those of African descent were inferior to caucasiansr. For a college like MTU (lots of attached racial baggage) to approve such a tableau is just insensitive. Also, again, restating, Agassiz was a grade A racist asshole and we should not have a "research" vessel named after him.