Peirce’s Pragmaticism: A Radical Perspective is a truly groundbreaking work on Charles Sanders Peirce. It reviews the many-sided pragmatism originally proposed by Peirce, lucidly distinguishing it from the versions of John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and others, and, more important, it resituates it within a more radical, postmodern framework. E. San Juan Jr. places Peirce’s thought in a historical context, drawing parallels with other progressive trends, in particular critical ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, Michael Denning and others. This is an important engagement with what’s current in the intellectual exchanges among international participants.

Peter McLaren, Chapman University

That E. San Juan is of Philippine ancestry is less important than the fact that his intellectual contributions—universal in appeal, encyclopedic in scope, critical in style and commitment—are his own modest attempt to stitch together and make coherent a form of understanding of reality that is as total as he could possibly make it in his lifetime, particularly in its historical, cultural, and ideological manifestations—that would otherwise be loose, disparate, incoherent, and therefore less meaningful because of their lack of connection with the whole.

Kenneth E. Bauzon, St. Joseph's College, New York