Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service

Rating:
Summary: wonderful sense of the period
Review: 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!