First edition. 8vo. xiv, [2], 446 pp. Original red-brown cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (contents clean and unmarked; jacket slightly worn with a few tiny nicks and short closed tears to extremities, minor loss head of spine panel and corners, notwithstanding a really excellent copy, rare as such). New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.
A major work on epistemology by the Harvard philosopher C.I. Lewis in which he development his own distinctive position of ‘conceptual pragmatism’. ‘Maintaining the pragmatist conception of mind as an evolved natural instrument, Lewis none the less stressed, like Kant, the formal conceptual aspects of knowledge. Capable of constructing alternative sets of concepts, the mind chooses pragmatically which set it will use to interpret the data’ (Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, p. 457).
