a wholesale abnegation of our aspirations to something 'higher' than mere animality

something exempt from the vicissitudes of time and history

this philosophical ignoramus could, ceteris paribus, be just as good a judge

Dewey's great contribution to the theory of education was to help us get rid of the idea that education is a matter of either inducing or educing truth.

He is in a mood of wry abjuration

all the great dualisms of Western philosophy--reality and appearance, pure radiance and diffuse reflection, mind and body, intellectual rigour and sensual sloppiness, orderly semiotics and rambling semiosis

The final stage of the Pragmatist's Progress comes when one begins to see one's previous peripeties not as stages in the ascent toward Enlightenment, but simply as the contingent results of encounters with various books which happened to fall into one's hands.

role in the immanent teleology of world history

Christian Socialism' is pleonastic: nowadays you cannot hope for the fraternity which the Gospels preach without hoping that democratic governments will redistribute money and opportunity in a way that the market never will.

The idea that we have a moral duty to correspond to reality is, for Nietzsche andJames, as stultifYing as the idea that the whole duty of man is to please God.