Art & Synergetics · Paper · 2026

Before Pragmatism Had a Name: Blake's "America A Prophecy" Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology

Daniel Ari Friedman

Zenodo

Catalog Row3
Citation KeyFriedman2026BeforePragmatismHadName003
Paper FolderAvailable
DOI10.5281/zenodo.18807970
Platform availability

Overview

Extracted from the local paper documentation when available.

Before Pragmatism Had a Name examines how William Blake's America: A Prophecy anticipates American anticipatory epistemology. The paper identifies six structural convergences between Blake's prophetic vision and pragmatist philosophy, arguing that Blake's visionary epistemology prefigures key concepts in American pragmatism (Peirce, Dewey, James) before the formal emergence of the pragmatist...

William Blakepragmatismanticipatory epistemologyAmerica a ProphecyPeirceDeweyJamesprophetic vision

Use Notes

Concise findings and methods pulled from README/SKILL documentation.

Findings / Concepts
  • When Boston's Angel in William Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) declares "No more I follow, no more obedience pay!" and the Thirteen Governors rend their robes to stand with Washington in the revolutionary flames, Blake enacts a drama of cognition that the American Pragmatists—writing a cont
  • Orc's revolutionary fire maps onto Peirce's irritation of doubt that compels inquiry; the Thirteen Angels' collective transformation mirrors Mead's social self constituted through the generalized other; the consumption of the "five gates of their law-built Heaven" performs Dewey's collapse of the sp
  • The convergences are not analogical but structural, and this manuscript formalizes them through the mathematics of Active Inference—the process theory of the Free Energy Principle—in which the Markov blanket becomes Blake's doors of perception, the generative model becomes imagination as
Methods / Techniques
  • Visual and symbolic analysis
  • Cross-domain pattern mapping

Citation

Plain-text citation for quick reuse.

Friedman, Daniel Ari. 2026. Before Pragmatism Had a Name: Blake's "America A Prophecy" Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18807970. URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18807970.

Primary source Documentation Full Text Image Gallery BibTeX

Related in Art & Synergetics

Other catalogued works in the same domain.

View all Art & Synergetics works, software & media →