Per Pragmatism, Philosophy Isn't Passive

In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand tells the story of how William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Peirce and their friends developed Pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy. James’s insight was that thinking isn’t a passive mirror of the world but a way of coping with it. We don’t simply discover truth; we make it, by testing ideas against experience to see what works. Put differently, philosophy is not something that sits apart from reality but is in a kind of dialogue with it, at turns shaping and being shaped by it. How we think about reality changes reality ... and that, in turn, changes how we think. Perception, thought, action and reality are entangled with one another.