Pragmatic Diction: Owen Barfield, the Inklings and Pragmatism

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) has been a very eclectic writer: poet, novelist, and philosopher. Though almost unknown to philosophy scholars, his thought has been very influential on the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and it is worth being studied, understood, and used in connection with pragmatism. His philosophy amounts to a strong metaphysical realism that can parallel Peirce’s view of scholastic realism and, more generally, the pragmatist attitude toward a comprehension of reality based on continuity. Moreover, Barfield sustains a view of knowledge as ‘participation’ that is very close to Peirce’s understanding of knowledge as representation. Finally, he proposes a form of ‘synthetic’ reasoning that goes the same direction as many classical pragmatists’ attempts. Therefore, the threefold philosophical aim of this paper is (1) to introduce Owen Barfield’s main theories, (2) to show the parallel between Barfield’s and pragmatists’, and especially Peirce’s tenets, and (3) to show how pragmatism and Barfield’s theory can be reciprocally useful