Philosophy

Philosophy. Philosophy in America has a long history, traceable at least to Jonathan Edwards in the mid–eighteenth century. For the most part, the discipline has been centered in colleges and universities where philosophy has taken on many roles: handmaiden to theology, instructor in morals for young men, mediator of the conflicting claims of science and religion, foundational ground for human thought and action, and participant in a wider cultural conversation. From Edwards in his study, the discipline has grown to encompass several thousand men and women teaching and writing philosophy. Like the other academic disciplines, philosophy in the twentieth century developed characteristic institutions: Ph.D.‐granting graduate departments, refereed journals, professional organizations, and academic meetings. The development of American philosophy has thus been marked by both the achievements of individual philosophers and the rise of an academic discipline.

Colonial and Antebellum Eras.

The first significant American philosopher was the evangelical minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards. As a young student at Yale College, Edwards encountered the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton. His earliest writings reflect his preoccupation with philosophical and metaphysical problems posed by these writers. Following his own conversion experience; pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts; and leading role in the Great Awakening, Edwards increasingly employed his metaphysical rationalism in the service of Calvinist theology. In his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Edwards wrestled with the problem of knowledge, which would preoccupy American philosophers for the next 250 years. An idealist, he argued that both sensation and reflection produced direct knowledge of mind and nature. In Freedom of the Will (1754), Edwards argued that belief in freedom was possible even for a determinist. He defended freedom by dividing the universe into two spheres—God's world ruled by determinism and the finite world in which real freedom of choice was possible. Edwards's writing on knowledge, religious belief, and free will influenced theological and philosophic thought well into the nineteenth century.

Early nineteenth‐century philosophy retained close ties to theology, but philosophers increasingly congregated in the colleges and universities of the eastern states. After Edwards, philosophy developed in several directions. Philosophers in New England, especially, worked in an Edwardsian tradition that focused on problems of the relations of God and man, nature and spirit, and the freedom of the will. Another strain derived from the philosophy of Scottish realism. James McCosh (1811–1894) at Princeton and Noah Porter (1811–1892) at Yale developed subtle versions of the Scottish position that the task of philosophy is to examine and make explicit the implicit assumptions of commonsense belief. Sensation and perception provided reliable knowledge of the external world and made scientific knowledge possible. The third strain of academic philosophy was moral philosophy. Often taught by the college president as a culminating class for seniors, moral philosophy was designed to inculcate the moral values of the culture in each generation of future leaders. Usually taught from texts, such as Francis Wayland's Elements of Moral Science (1835) or Mark Hopkins's Lectures on Moral Science (1862), moral philosophy rooted individual and national morality firmly within the Christian tradition. These philosophers broke little new ground, and the challenge to these orthodoxies came from outside the academy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson represents the late stage of New England Calvinism and a bridge to the more secular philosophers of the late nineteenth century. Emerson's transcendentalism was rooted in the liberal Unitarianism to which was added an element of German idealism ultimately derived from Immanuel Kant. As much a literary movement as a philosophical one, transcendentalism's key text was Emerson's short book Nature (1836). Nature was the vehicle by which human beings gained insight into the ideal world that transcended the mundane reality. Through nature, the individual consciousness could have direct contact with, and understanding of, this higher reality. The transcendentalists' reliance on the authority of individual consciousness and the primacy of action and creativity over contemplation and theory helped lay the groundwork for the development of pragmatism, the most significant distinctively American philosophy.

Pragmatism and Instrumentalism.

Pragmatism originated in the meetings of the Metaphysical Club, a group of young men who gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1870s to discuss philosophical issues. The participants included Chauncey Wright (1830–1875), Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James. As it developed in the work of Peirce, James, and later John Dewey, pragmatism focused on the problems of knowledge, truth, and meaning. Drawing on the emerging sciences, including Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, pragmatism emphasized the primacy of action over theory and the value of contingency, novelty, and progress that for James was centered on the individual and for Peirce and Dewey on the community.

Peirce articulated the basic premises of pragmatism in articles published in the 1870s, especially The Fixation of Belief (1877) and How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878). Our conception of an object, Peirce argued, lies in its practical consequences. For him, pragmatism was a method for clarifying the meaning and truth of objects and theories by determining their future practical consequences. Invoking the scientific method, he saw truth as contingent and evolving and determined by a consensus of those competent to judge in a particular situation. Peirce's pragmatism depended upon his influential semiotics, or theory of signs. All thinking, meaning, and truth, he believed, relies upon socially standardized signs contingently established by a community of interpreters.

James was an innovative psychologist as well as a philosopher. His Principles of Psychology (1890) helped establish experimental psychology in the United States and defined the field for many years to come. Upon the completion of this work, James turned more fully to the pragmatic philosophy being elaborated by his friend Peirce. James's more individualistic version of pragmatism was rooted in his psychology and in his own personal need to establish a means of finding truth in the fluid contingency of the modern world. James tended to conflate meaning and truth, and to describe as true any idea that leads to a satisfactory and beneficial experience. For James, Peirce's reliance on scientific experimentalism was too narrow to deal adequately with the manifold pluralities confronting individuals. By focusing on what worked for the individual in a particular cultural context, James sought a reliable means to establish truth and knowledge without resting on the bedrock of some absolute. More accessible and popular than Peirce, James outlined pragmatism for a wide audience in Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909).

Dewey, whose long academic career took him from the University of Michigan to the University of Chicago and ultimately Columbia University, developed the third major version of pragmatism. Dewey's pragmatism, like Peirce's, was more communitarian in that it emphasized the adaptation of the individual and the community to changed circumstances. Dewey situated the individual in the social context and developed pragmatism as a process of social reconstruction based on communal inquiry and experimentation. Dewey's instrumentalism was both a theory and a method of inquiry for solving problems and for generating truth, or what he called warranted assertion. Pragmatism was thus an activist philosophy operating within a democratic community to direct beneficial adaptive change to altered social circumstances. Dewey exemplified his call to action through his own extensive commitment to education reform and a variety of social and political reforms.

Idealism and Realism.

James's friend and Harvard colleague Josiah Royce (1855–1916), the strongest American proponent of absolute idealism at the turn of the century, provided a powerful counter to the generally realistic philosophy of the pragmatists. In his early writings, Royce postulated the Absolute as the solution to the problem of error. Under James's influence, Royce modified his views, moving toward what he called absolute pragmatism. In later work influenced by Peirce's semiotics, Royce developed the idea of the community of interpretation as providing a social basis for reality. The Universal Community, which possessed truth in its totality, became for Royce a viable alternative to the Absolute.

Epistemological realism also found new adherents in the early twentieth century. The new realists, which included Edwin B. Holt (1873–1946) and Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957), argued for realism in which we can directly apprehend the qualities of an object. The critical realists, which included George Santayana (1863–1952) of Harvard and Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962) of Johns Hopkins University, countered by arguing for a dualistic realism in which objects are only indirectly perceived through the mediation of ideas. Santayana was noted not only for his realism, but also for his skepticism and naturalism and his highly literary style of philosophizing. Lovejoy went on to develop the influential method of tracing fundamental ideas through history, as in The Great Chain of Being (1936).

Professionalization and European Influences.

With the exception of Peirce, all of the philosophers following Emerson had successful careers in colleges and universities. By the late nineteenth century, philosophy was loosening its ties to theology on the one hand and to psychology on the other. Although many turn‐of‐the‐twentieth‐century philosophers had a traditional Christian upbringing and may have even considered the ministry, their philosophical training took place in the secularizing graduate schools patterned on that of Johns Hopkins, established in 1876. In this milieu, the path to a career in philosophy was increasingly well defined: graduate training, especially at universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Columbia; appointment to a collegiate or university faculty; publication in one of the new journals such as Philosophical Review (1892) or The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (1904); and membership in the new American Philosophical Association (1901). By the early twentieth century, American philosophy had become thoroughly secularized and was seeking to emulate the sciences in its methods, rigor, and explanatory power.

During the interwar years, American philosophy was substantially influenced by European ideas and philosophers. The first significant immigrant was the English philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), appointed at Harvard in 1924. His early work in logic and mathematics with his student Bertrand Russell contributed to the development of an analytic tradition in the United States. Much of his work at Harvard focused on metaphysics, especially his emphasis on organicism and process. His stress on the organism's selective responses to the changing environment in which it operates proved particularly significant for American social thought. During the 1930s, other philosophers immigrated to the United States, especially from central Europe following the rise of fascism. Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), a German logical positivist, and Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), a German philosopher of science, both accepted positions at American universities in the late 1930s.

The writings of these and other European analytic philosophers and logical positivists had already crossed the Atlantic to a favorable reception. The pragmatists, with their emphasis on the problems of truth and knowledge, and reliance on scientific methods, had created an intellectual climate congenial to the seemingly more rigorous methods of the Europeans. Philosophy, in this context, means the careful definition of terms, the analysis and reduction of linguistic complexities to simple terms, and the study of logical syntax. The logical positivists stressed several related ideas including a verifiable theory of meaning, rejection of metaphysics, the unity of the sciences, and the logical analysis of mathematics and science. Because they promised a more rigorous and scientific approach to the problems of truth and knowledge so prevalent in American philosophy, these ideas, once they took hold, dominated philosophical thinking until well into the 1970s.

Post–World War II Developments.

Following World War II, American philosophers largely focused on the problems raised by analytic philosophy and logical positivism. The most important philosopher in this tradition was Harvard's W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000), the foremost logician of the twentieth century. Quine's work in logic was especially important in the development of set theory. He drew both on the pragmatic tradition and the analytic and positivistic traditions to elucidate how we use language to describe and understand the workings of the world. Other important postwar philosophers included John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice (1971) helped revive the close study of moral theory, and Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) reconfigured both the history and the philosophy of science. As a counter to the prevailing analytic and logical traditions, American philosophy was also invigorated by new European imports, including existentialism immediately following World War II and later the work of such contemporary French philosophers as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and the German Martin Heidegger.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, American philosophy became increasingly diverse in both its subject matter and its methodology. This period was marked by Richard Rorty's notable rejection of the hegemony of the analytic tradition. Rorty in the 1970s returned to an earlier pragmatic tradition in giving up the search for absolute foundations for knowledge in either science or logic. In his influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty abandoned a representational theory of reality, in which the mind more or less accurately mirrors the absolute reality, in favor of the argument that knowledge is always constructed by the individual in a particular context for a particular need. If philosophers were nolonger to serve as the final arbiters of truth and knowledge, they could and should, Rorty argued, still participate in the conversations that create and critique the cultures in which we live.

At the end of the century, postanalytic and neopragmatic philosophers predominated. Philosophical approaches had become much more diverse, as had the profession itself, which now encompassed such fields of inquiry as feminist philosophy and environmental ethics. For example, Sandra Harding (1935– ) developed an influential feminist approach to knowing and to the philosophy of science, and Tom Regan (1938– ) did significant work in environmental ethics, with a particular focus on animal rights. Pragmatic thought experienced a revival, both in renewed study of Peirce, James, and Dewey, and in works by Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, John Smith, Cornel West, and others. All these philosophers tried to articulate a neopragmatism that was broadly conceived as problem‐solving adaptability, rather than narrowly focused on establishing the bases of truth, meaning, and the possibility of knowledge. Philosophy in the United States was well established within higher education as the twenty‐first century began, but with rare exceptions, contemporary philosophers lacked the broad cultural appeal and influence exercised by James and Dewey at the beginning of the twentieth century.
See also Education: The Rise of the University; Professionalization; Religion; Secularization; Unitarianism and Universalism.

Bibliography

Herbert W. Schneider , A History of American Philosophy, 1946.
Morton White , Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey, 1972.
Bruce Kuklick , The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930, 1977.
Elizabeth Flower and and Murray G. Murphey , A History of Philosophy in America, 2 vols., 1977.
Bruce Kuklick , Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey, 1985.
Cornel West , The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 1989.
Daniel J. Wilson , Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860–1930, 1990.
John Patrick Diggins , The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority, 1995.
Robert Hollinger and David Depew, eds., Pragamatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, 1995.

Daniel J. Wilson