Pragmatism and philosophical coordinate systems

I was reading (and listening to) various fragments of The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand recently. It's a great book and audio book.

It occurred to me that my way of looking at various philosophical systems is actually pretty close to the way the Pragmatist school of philosophy looks at them. I usually think about materialism, dualism, or solipsism as philosophical coordinate systems, and my usual position is that we are free to switch between them, or to construct the new ones. ( Read more... )