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The Metaphysical Club
- A Story of Ideas in America
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's summary
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea.
Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America.
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We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.
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Not full of SJW nonsense
- By Frank on 10-22-18
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Our Declaration
- A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
- By: Danielle Allen
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In just 1,337 words, the Declaration of Independence changed the world, but curiously it is now rarely read from start to finish, much less understood. Unsettled by this, Danielle Allen read the text quietly with students and discovered its animating power. "Bringing the analytical skills of a philosopher, the voice of a gifted memoirist, and the spirit of a soulful humanist to the task, Allen manages to find new meaning in Thomas Jefferson' s understanding of equality," says Joseph J. Ellis about Our Declaration.
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Second Most Interesting Book I've Ever Read
- By Christopher on 01-27-15
By: Danielle Allen
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Friends Divided
- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
- By: Gordon S. Wood
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slave owner while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government.
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A Great Read
- By Jean on 12-22-17
By: Gordon S. Wood
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The Enlightenment
- And Why It Still Matters
- By: Anthony Pagden
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 16 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world. Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which changed forever the intellectual landscape of the Western world.
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A thorough political tract rather than history
- By Jacobus on 03-08-14
By: Anthony Pagden
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The Long March
- How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
- By: Roger Kimball
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
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The architects of America's cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
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The Long March
- By Suzanne on 05-16-06
By: Roger Kimball
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Notes on a Century
- Reflections of a Middle East Historian
- By: Bernard Lewis, Buntzie Ellis Churchill
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Few historians end up as historical actors in their own right, but Bernard Lewis has both witnessed and participated in some of the key events of the last century. When we think of the Middle East, we see it in terms that he defined and articulated.In this exceptional memoir he shares stories of his wartime service in London and Cairo, decrypting intercepts for MI6, with sometimes unexpected consequences. After the war, he was the first Western scholar ever invited into the Ottoman archives in Istanbul.
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Can't Get Enough of the Book
- By Sanford H. on 12-11-13
By: Bernard Lewis, and others
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Passionate Sage
- The Character and Legacy of John Adams
- By: Joseph J. Ellis
- Narrated by: Tom Parker
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of our nation and its second president, spent nearly the last third of his life in retirement, grappling with contradictory views of his place in history and fearing his reputation would not fare well in the generations after his death. And indeed, future generations did slight him, elevating Jefferson and Madison to lofty heights while Adams remained way back in the second tier.
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Stays true to Audible's description
- By Neil on 10-24-09
By: Joseph J. Ellis
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The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
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Imbeciles
- The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
- By: Adam Cohen
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”
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Compelling Concept, Aggravating Execution
- By Gillian on 04-05-16
By: Adam Cohen
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Marx's General
- The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
- By: Tristram Hunt
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the 19th century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman.
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Not many choices here anyways.
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 02-16-13
By: Tristram Hunt
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Infinitesimal
- How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World
- By: Amir Alexander
- Narrated by: Ira Rosenberg
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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On August 10, 1632, five men in flowing black robes convened in a somber Roman palazzo to pass judgment on a deceptively simple proposition: that a continuous line is composed of distinct and infinitely tiny parts. With the stroke of a pen the Jesuit fathers banned the doctrine of infinitesimals, announcing that it could never be taught or even mentioned. The concept was deemed dangerous and subversive, a threat to the belief that the world was an orderly place, governed by a strict and unchanging set of rules.
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An intriguing and underappreciated bit of history
- By Marino on 09-22-14
By: Amir Alexander
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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What listeners say about The Metaphysical Club
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Alexandra
- 06-01-24
Amazing book, minor pronunciation problems with names
Pronunciation of “Peirce” and “Du Bois” (especially the latter) was somewhat distracting. Otherwise an amazing book and a fantastic reader.
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- PaulC
- 08-08-23
Cogent neurophilosology
Wha? This was a great story about some of the more interested thinkers of the past century(ies) that influenced us all. To me, it’s the clearest history I’ve read that merges philosophy, logic, science, neurophysiology, cosmology, psychology, politics, law, cultural diversity, and disability (to name just a few) into a cogent and compelling ball of wax one can get one’s mind around…a veritable sense of a bullseye amid the spread of diverse and multi-dimensional facts abducted toward a truth?
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2 people found this helpful
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- Edwards
- 10-06-23
Terrific book, performer mispronounces key names
An exceptional work of scholarship that will open a vast new conception of the history of ideas to the non-philosophers that this accessible book is designed to reach. Paul Heitsch’s performance is spirited too. However, Heitsch mispronounces key names throughout the book: the name Peirce is supposed to be pronounced like ‘purse’; not like ‘pierce’, as Heitsch does. Dilthey is supposed to be pronounced ‘Dil-tie’, not ‘dil-thee’. Considering he is a protagonist of this account, it is mind-numbing to hear the intellectual giant Peirce’s name mispronounced over and over again. You people had one job.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Patrick Gillam
- 10-28-22
Insight and stimulation, if not complete comprehension
At one point in “The Metaphysical Club,” Menand observes that even such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson would read books for any insight and stimulation they might offer, and abandon efforts at complete comprehension. That is the way I had to read this book. It has far too much happening for me to fully comprehend, but I found it delightful to listen to. The ideas are stimulating, the characters are inspiring, and the writing is luminous.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Jeffrey
- 07-03-22
so significant that it overcomes its flaws
this book is paired with Menand's The Free world, and in some ways is less well written. for example, I don't think we need the extraordinary amount of space given to an explanation of statistical calculation. There are times when I believe that other lines of explanation could be shortened - but none of this should keep potential readers from a work that is so good at explaining the past seen through philosophy, legal reasoning, and the personal experience of the major characters in the book. so it deserves five stars, despite its flaws.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Bryan Decker
- 01-15-20
Hands down the best non fiction book I've read
History, philosophy, psychology, sociology. This book has such depth and scope that it demands rereading. Its the one book I would recommend to anyone and everyone.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Will
- 09-26-21
Narrator needs to do his homework
Excellent overall and the performance is marred only by the narrator’s failure to learn the correct pronunciation of individual names. In addition to an incorrect French pronunciation of W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Pierce should be pronounced as “purse.” It's understandable that anglophones typically are awful when reading sections written in a language other than English, but there’s no excuse for not using the proper pronunciation when referring to the central characters in a text.
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3 people found this helpful
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- TJay
- 07-26-21
Mispronunciation
How could a major production allow W. E. B DuBois’s last name to be mispronounced? It’s a travesty and a major disservice to the author.
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5 people found this helpful