Speaking of Louis Menand, I just started The Metaphysical Club. Kinda boring so far; I have to say that rich Harvard types during the Civil War is about the least interesting topic possible for me. I'd be more into that Norman Cohn book Mike just linked. I'll give it a few more pages - maybe the William James section gets interesting.
I read it when it came out. I really enjoyed it, and I love Menand's pieces in the New Yorker, but after I read it I decided to never read philosophy ever again. The whole business of philosophy seems to be just groundless speculation and its careful refutation. It's cool that the pragmatists broke through that and I love 'em for it, but that pragmatism wasn't already taken for granted shows how nuts philosophers are. Sometimes they get lucky and actually figure something out -- if you go back far enough in any science it'll start with brainstorming philosophers -- but then it starts being science and stops being philosophy. So what you're left with is what Van Morrison says: "Questions! Questions! Questions!"
I think this is where we differ: I'm with Slavoj Žižek when he says that philosophy and metaphysics are essentially useless when it comes to the physical world, and that's how it should be. I think James et. al belong to an essentially different discipline: ethics, perhaps, or sociology, or policy. I have nothing at all against any of that, though this goddamn book is still boring me. I'm sticking with it out of compulsion, or maybe because I like Menand's
New Yorker articles, or maybe some blinkered notion that reading outside of my comfort zone is somehow good for me. But I find myself reaching for a lot magazines and comics in the process, a sure sign that I'm not that eager to get back into the antics of Louis Aggasiz.
I will admit that the scientific racism stuff is pretty interesting, however.