Recovering Benjamin Franklin

by James Campbell Lewis and James Campbell

Book Overview

In this work, the author attempts to define Benjamin Franklin's role as a philosopher. The book lays out in detail Franklin's ideas in four areas: science, religion, morality and politics; ultimately concluding that Franklin should be considered an early figure in the Pragmatist movement.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812693876
• ISBN13: 9780812693874
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Open Court
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

wonderful sense of the period

Campbell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo, is one of America's foremost experts on the development of the philosophy of pragmatism. In this book, he has carried his studies on that development into what one may call its fetal period -- the pre-pragmatism of Ben Franklin. The essential insight of pragmatism, and of Franklin, Campbell tells, us, is that the "search for wisdom" cannot be understood aside from the effort to "advance human well-being."This is a wonderful book, and it brings alive the leading ideas of the generation of the founding fathers in a way few other recent books have!