Louis Menand lectures on pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy based on experience and experiment rather than fixed principles. Louis Menand, professor of English and American literature and language in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and a member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty, is the author of *The Metaphysical Club* (2001), an exploration of American pragmatism that examines the transformation of American intellectual thought from 1865 to 1919 and explores the development of the pragmatism philosophy.
Louis Menand is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He received his BA (1973) from Pomona and his MA (1975) and PhD (1980) from Columbia. His primary interests are 19th and 20th century cultural history. His books include *The Marketplace of Ideas* (W. W. Norton & Co, 2010); *American Studies* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); *The Metaphysical Club* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); *The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the New Criticism*, co-ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2000); *The Future of Academic Freedom*, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1997); *Pragmatism: A Reader*, ed. (Vintage, 1996); and *Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context* (Oxford University Press, 1987). He is also a staff writer for *The New Yorker*.