# Pragmatism — Character guide

> Key figures in Pragmatism by William James.

- [The Narrator](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/unknown_narrator.md): A philosopher addressing a general audience, confessing his tremor at daring to make the cosmos vivid without going dry or technical.
- [John Locke](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/locke.md): The English empiricist who turned personal identity into a pragmatic question of memory, asking what the soul is worth if consciousness vanishes.
- [F. C. S. Schiller](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/schiller.md): The humanist who calls the world plastic and truths man-made, pushing pragmatism so far he must be defended from his own boldness.
- [Herbert Spencer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/herbert_spencer.md): The evolutionary philosopher whose grand system James invokes as a foil, the kind of universe that lends itself to lengthy professorial discourse.
- [Pragmatism](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/pragmatism_concept.md): A method that asks what concrete difference a belief makes, collapsing disputes into insignificance when no practical consequence can be traced.
- [George Berkeley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/berkeley.md): Idealist philosopher whose subjective idealism is discussed in relation to pragmatism.
- [Wilhelm Ostwald](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/ostwald.md): Chemist and philosopher whose energetic theory is cited in pragmatic contexts.
- [John Dewey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/john_dewey.md): The instrumentalist ally whose name travels alongside Schiller's, part of the new dawn James believes is breaking over philosophy.
- [James Clerk Maxwell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/clerk_maxwell.md): Physicist whose scientific methodology is referenced as a model for pragmatism.
- [The Absolute](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/the_absolute.md): In the world of the lectures, the Absolute is the rival camp's crown jewel: an eternal way of thinking that our ideas supposedly copy, granting the mind stable equilibrium the moment it arrives. James grants the idea its
- [Charles Sanders Peirce](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/charles_peirce.md): Peirce stands behind the whole enterprise: the man whose principle, applied to concrete cases, turns abstract disputes into questions about what would actually differ in practice. James treats him as a forerunner who gen
- [Immanuel Kant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/kant.md): Kant haunts the lectures as the towering intellectualist whose vocabulary — the categorical imperative, truth as a static relation — James borrows only to interrogate. In the passages, his shadow falls across the drama o
- [David Hume](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/hume.md): Empiricist philosopher whose skepticism is discussed in relation to pragmatic truth.
- [Swami Vivekananda](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pragmatism_se/characters/swami_vivekananda.md): Indian philosopher and spiritual leader cited in discussions of religious experience.

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