|
Search over 100 encyclopedias and dictionaries: |
Research categories | Follow us on Twitter |
Research categories
View all topics in the newsView all reference sources at Encyclopedia.com |
|||
Philosophy
312. PhilosophySee also 21. ARGUMENTATION ; 100. COSMOLOGY ; 104. CRITICISM ; 145. ETHICS ; 216. IDEAS ; 233. KNOWLEDGE ; 250. LOGIC ; 392. THEOLOGY ; 393. THINKING ; 402. TRUTH and ERROR ; 405. UNDERSTANDING ; 407. VALUES ; 422. WISDOM .
|
|
|
Cite this article
"Philosophy." -Ologies and -Isms. 1986. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Philosophy." -Ologies and -Isms. 1986. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2505200323.html "Philosophy." -Ologies and -Isms. 1986. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2505200323.html |
|
Philosophy
PHILOSOPHYPHILOSOPHY. In the sixteenth century, "philosophy" still meant Aristotelianism in its medieval Christian form, with Platonism and other ancient doctrines, including stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, eclecticism, and various occult traditions, remaining on the academic margins, though they were becoming lively topics of intellectual controversy. Philosophical practice of the period was increasingly devoted to the comparative study of these systems. Opposing these dogmatic (or skeptical) traditions, however, was the novel and unorthodox question posed by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), "whether it is useful for Christian philosophy to construct a new philosophy after that of the pagans, and if so, on what grounds." This was a challenge taken up by a number of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century thinkers, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and other Neoplatonists; Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus, and other humanists; Rudolphus Agricola, Petrus Ramus, and other reformers of rhetoric and logic; Jacopo Zabarella, Giordano Bruno, and other Italian natural philosophers; and Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and other champions of the "party of nature" and a self-proclaimed "new philosophy." The study of these and other philosophical movements beyond the academic mainstream has been pursued in the past two generations, especially by Paul Oskar Kristeller and his students. This has opened up new perspectives on the history of Western thought, even though the older traditions—which tend to jump from the medieval theologian-philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225–1274) and Scholasticism directly to Descartes (1596–1650), the French rationalist and metaphysician, and other seventeenth-century system builders—have remained dominant in the modern philosophical canon. THE BREAK WITH SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHYAccording to convention, modern philosophy begins with Descartes and the English empiricist and philosopher of science Francis Bacon (1561–1626), pivotal figures who broke decisively with the intellectual system of the late medieval world and helped to articulate a new agenda for philosophy. This simplifies a complex story, as medieval philosophy gave way to early modern systems of thought slowly, across several generations. But Bacon and Descartes indeed helped to usher in a revolutionary period in philosophy, with upheavals in crucial areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy. At the start of the seventeenth century, the presumptive authority of time-tested ancient thinkers, particularly the towering figure of Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), still carried great weight in philosophy and the sciences. The overwhelmingly dominant philosophical system, firmly entrenched in the universities, was Aristotelian Scholasticism, a synthesis of Aristotle's philosophy with Christian doctrine that had been forged by Aquinas. But modern philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes rejected this traditional deference toward Aristotle and other ancient figures of authority and broke with the Scholastic system. The decline in respect for traditional philosophical authorities had various sources. The religious crises of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had shaken the presumption in favor of tradition, opening space for a more assertive questioning of received doctrine. Humanist scholars had unearthed and reintroduced lost systems of thought, such as ancient Greek atomism and classical skepticism, that presented alternatives to the theories of Aristotle, encouraging critical debate on the merits of all these competing systems. Developments in Renaissance science and the burgeoning scientific revolution were also exposing the fallibility of Aristotelian physics and cosmology. While Scholastic philosophy continued to dominate the universities through the seventeenth century, the main developments in modern philosophy came from thinkers operating outside of this old establishment, usually men of independent means or supported by aristocratic patronage rather than a professor's salary. These philosophers typically addressed their works to the educated classes more broadly and wrote in the vernacular rather than the Latin of Scholastic academia. In practice the break with the Scholastic intellectual system helped to reestablish philosophy as an autonomous discipline outside of theology. While most of the leading early modern philosophers were religious believers who sought to develop philosophical theories consistent with their religious commitments, nevertheless there was a marked shift toward the scientific study of human nature and the physical world, unmediated by an explicit emphasis on theological doctrine. The trend toward secularization encompassed even ethics and political philosophy, with philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), David Hume (1711–1776), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) founding moral and political principles on reason or human nature, rather than the commands of God. (This "secularization thesis" is also part of the conventional story of modern philosophy, but it has been challenged by some recent scholars, most notably Hans Blumenberg.) ASSOCIATION WITH THE NEW SCIENCEThe agenda of early modern philosophy was closely connected with the new scientific worldview pioneered by figures such as Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), and Newton (1642–1727). Bacon, Descartes, and the philosophers who followed them were gripped by the explanatory range and power of the new science and were concerned to articulate, codify, and defend its methods and to explore its implications for metaphysics and epistemology. Several philosophers of the period were involved firsthand in the practice of science: leading examples include Descartes and the German philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Kant. Early modern philosophers would also self-consciously import the experimental method of the new science into the realm of philosophy, as in the theories of mind developed by the British empiricists John Locke (1632–1704) and Hume. The new scientific worldview brought a fresh range of philosophical questions to the fore. First, there were questions concerning scientific method (a particular interest of Bacon, Locke, and Hume). How could inductive extrapolation from observed phenomena to unobserved cases be justified? Would science ever show us the inner essence of things and explain their underlying causal powers, or was it limited to merely cataloging correlations and patterns among surface phenomena? Then there were the metaphysical questions. What did the success of the new mathematical, quantitative models of nature show us about the relationship between mathematics on the one hand and empirical reality on the other? In what sense were subjective features of experience like colors and sounds part of the material world? And, most pressingly, what was the status of human beings in the scientific world picture? Was there still room for free will, morality, religion, and the human soul in the vast, cold, deterministic world of the new mathematical sciences? EPISTEMOLOGYEarly modern philosophy is justly famous for its reorientation toward epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. The examination of the processes by which we arrive at and justify knowledge claims took on a new primacy in the period, as philosophers such as Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant each in their own way urged the importance of clarifying the nature and limits of our own cognitive faculties. Apart from the general wisdom of examining the sources and justifiability of our beliefs before boldly advancing theories on subjects that may exceed our capacities, the new emphasis on epistemology had several more immediate motivations. It was connected to the collapse in the prestige of traditional sources of authority such as Aristotle and church doctrine. If ancient authorities no longer commanded automatic deference, then who—or what—should a responsible thinker take as a legitimate source of knowledge? It was also related to the questions of method and scientific procedure raised by the achievements of the new science. Most famously, it was prompted by the skeptical onslaught of figures like Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the great French essayist and popularizer of ancient forms of skepticism, who argued that all the bases of our so-called knowledge are inadequate. It is customary to distinguish between two main factions in early modern epistemology: the empiricists on the one hand and the rationalists on the other. The distinction can be overemphasized at the risk of falsely caricaturing the rationalists as hostile to empirical investigation, or of obscuring a complex pattern of intellectual influences back and forth between the two groups. Nevertheless the distinction does capture an important difference in approaches to the theory of knowledge. The empiricists—led by Bacon, Locke, and Hume—argued that all our ideas are ultimately acquired in experience, and that the limits of experience set boundaries on our knowledge. The empiricist thus counsels a certain humility: our knowledge is forever limited to the patterns and regularities we witness among the empirically observable features of the world; metaphysical speculation about the inner nature of things transcends our capacities. By contrast, the rationalists—led by Descartes, the Dutch Jewish metaphysician Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Leibniz—argued that our minds are innately furnished with certain ideas over and above those we acquire in experience. Using these innate ideas we can reason about things transcending experience. For the rationalist, this explains how we can have knowledge that goes beyond all possible empirical confirmation, either because of its universal nature (logic, mathematics, knowledge of the laws of nature) or because of its transcendent subject matter (God, the soul, morality). METAPHYSICSEarly modern philosophers explored a wide range of issues in metaphysics (the study of the ultimate nature of reality), including, notably, problems of space and time, causation, the ultimate structure of matter, the nature of morality, and God. However, the most characteristic metaphysical questions of the period focus on the connection between the human mind or soul on the one hand and the physical world on the other. Clearly these issues were related to the epistemological turn, and in particular to Descartes's famous skeptical problem of how we can know that there is a physical realm beyond our minds at all. But such questions were also forced by reflection on the new scientific worldview. Advocates of the new science such as Galileo and Descartes argued that the objective, mind-independent world described by science could be exhaustively characterized in terms of mathematically tractable "primary" qualities such as shape, size, and motion. "Secondary" qualities such as colors, tastes, sounds, and smells were then downgraded to a derivative status and were in some sense observer-relative and mind-dependent, more a feature of subjective experience than ultimate objective reality. This distinction had great appeal for most early moderns, but it would be challenged by figures such as the Irish cleric George Berkeley (1685–1753), Hume, and Kant, who pointed out that a clear distinction between mind-dependent and mind-independent properties is not so easy to draw. Kant argued that even space and time were mind-dependent or "ideal." For Berkeley the notion of any mind-independent reality whatsoever was fundamentally incoherent: all that exists are minds and their ideas. Granted the existence of an objective material realm, the next question concerned the relationship between the mind and the physical body. Descartes developed the popular theory that the mind is an immaterial soul-substance over and above the material brain, arguing that this helped to explain the existence of consciousness and made room both for an afterlife beyond bodily death and for free will (as well as moral responsibility) outside the deterministic laws governing the material order. But others thought the theory raised more problems than it solved, including difficulties in accounting for the causal interaction between immaterial soul and material body. Materialists such as Hobbes and Spinoza insisted that the human animal, mind included, was just a complex material system; others such as Locke counseled a metaphysical agnosticism about the ultimate nature of the thinking self. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHYThe medieval church and the Scholastic tradition had located the source of political legitimacy in implicit divine approval of established dynasties, a conservative doctrine that left little room for individual rights against the monarch or for systems of popular sovereignty. Leading Protestant theologians such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) reaffirmed the doctrine of divine right, although some of the more radical Anabaptist reformers preached against it. The main philosophical revolt against this medieval tradition came with the social contract theorists: the Dutch legal scholar and philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Hobbes, Locke, and the Swiss-born social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). These figures posited a hypothetical "state of nature" without government to explore the basic rights of the individual, and they argued that legitimate state authority was ultimately derived from such foundational individual rights, transferred conditionally through popular (though perhaps implicit) consent. The corollary was that individuals retained certain inalienable rights against government, that state authority was in some (perhaps quite attenuated) sense contingent on popular consent, and that regimes in breach of the implicit contract were illegitimate and could be justly overthrown. Locke would extend the contract theory to argue for religious toleration (although Catholics and atheists were excluded as beyond the pale) on the basis of natural rights, adding arguments premised on general empiricist epistemic humility and on the involuntary nature of religious belief. Conservatives such as Hume and Edmund Burke (1729–1797) attacked the contract theory, arguing that there was in fact no popular consent; the foundation of natural rights was metaphysically dubious; and the doctrine threatened to destabilize the ancient political settlements that secured peace and civic order. In the international arena the Florentine diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) notoriously endorsed realism, the harsh doctrine that there are no moral constraints governing relations between distinct states. Here he was followed by Hobbes, a skeptic about political morality in the absence of an overarching sovereign power to coercively enforce duties. Opponents of realism included Grotius, who developed a substantial system of international law and moral precepts on the basis of treaty, and Kant, who argued that reason prescribed a universal political morality transcending national jurisdictions and advocated the creation of a "league of nations" to enforce international law. See also Aristotelianism ; Bacon, Francis ; Berkeley, George ; Bruno, Giordano ; Burke, Edmund ; Descartes, René ; Empiricism ; Enlightenment ; Epistemology ; Erasmus, Desiderius ; Free Will ; Galileo Galilei ; Grotius, Hugo ; Hobbes, Thomas ; Hume, David ; Idealism ; Kant, Immanuel ; Kepler, Johannes ; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm ; Locke, John ; Logic ; Machiavelli, Niccolò ; Montaigne, Michel de ; Moral Philosophy and Ethics ; Nature ; Neoplatonism ; Newton, Isaac ; Political Philosophy ; Ramus, Petrus ; Renaissance ; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ; Scholasticism ; Scientific Revolution ; Skepticism, Academic and Pyrrhonian ; Spinoza, Baruch ; Stoicism . BIBLIOGRAPHYPrimary SourcesBacon, Francis. Selected Philosophical Works. Edited by Rose-Mary Sargent. Indianapolis, 1999. Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford and New York, 1998. ——. A Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge. Edited by Jonathan Dancy. Oxford and New York, 1997. Descartes, René. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge, U.K., 1988. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford and New York, 1999. ——. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford and New York, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, 1996. Translation of Kritik der reinen Vernuft (1781/1787). ——. Ethical Philosophy: The Complete Texts of Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, 1993. Includes a translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785). Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, 1989. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975. Spinoza, Baruch. A Spinoza Reader. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, 1994. Secondary SourcesAyers, Michael, and Daniel Garber, eds. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998. This collection of essays supplies impressive historical detail and covers many neglected figures from the period. It is extremely helpful for those already fairly familiar with the outlines of early modern philosophy, but perhaps a little overwhelming for the beginner. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass., 1983. Chappell, Vere, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. New York, 1953–1963. Superseded in parts by recent scholarship, but still a classic survey. Volume 3 covers the Renaissance up to Bacon; volume 4 covers the rationalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; volume 5 covers the British empiricists from Hobbes through Hume; and volume 6 covers the French Enlightenment and Kant. Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992. Cropsey, Joseph, and Leo Strauss, eds. History of Political Philosophy. 3rd ed. Chicago, 1987. Garrett, Don, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996. Guyer, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992. Jolley, Nicholas. Locke: His Philosophical Thought. Oxford and New York, 1999. Loeb, Louis E. From Descartes to Hume: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y., 1981. Presupposing some basic knowledge of standard approaches to the history of early modern philosophy, Loeb criticizes the traditional distinction drawn between the rationalists and the empiricists. Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993. Thomas Holden |
|
|
Cite this article
HOLDEN, THOMAS. "Philosophy." Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. HOLDEN, THOMAS. "Philosophy." Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404900862.html HOLDEN, THOMAS. "Philosophy." Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. 2004. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404900862.html |
|
Philosophy
PHILOSOPHYPHILOSOPHY in America has encompassed more or less systematic writing about the point of our existence and our ability to understand the world of which we are a part. These concerns are recognizable in the questions that thinkers have asked in successive eras and in the connections between the questions of one era and another. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theologians asked: What was the individual's relation to an inscrutable God? How could human autonomy be preserved, if the deity were omnipotent? After the English naturalist Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, philosophers asked: How could human freedom and our sense of the world's design be compatible with our status as biological entities? Early in the twentieth century academic thinkers wanted to know: If we were biological organisms, enmeshed in a causal universe, how could we come to have knowledge of this universe? How could mind escape the limits set by causal mechanisms? By the second half of the twentieth century, professional philosophers often assumed that we were of the natural world but simultaneously presupposed that knowledge demanded a transcendence of the natural. They then asked: How was knowledge possible? What were the alternatives to having knowledge? Much philosophical exchange existed across national boundaries, and it is not clear that anything unique characterizes American thought. Nonetheless, standard features of philosophy in this country stand out. In the period before the Revolutionary War, thinkers often looked at the "new learning" of Europe with distaste, and the greater religious coloration of American thought resulted from self-conscious attempts to purge thinking of the evils of the Old World. In the nineteenth century the close association of thinkers in Scotland and America revealed both their dislike of England and their sense of inferiority as its intellectual provinces. In the twentieth century the strength and freedom of the United States, especially in the period of Nazi dominance, made America an attractive destination for European intellectuals and dramatically altered philosophy at home. During the period of the Vietnam War suspicion of the United States also affected thought. From the middle of the eighteenth century American thinkers have been attracted to idealism, that speculative view that existence is essentially mental. The position of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the physical world did not transcend consciousness, or of objective or absolute idealism, that the world was an aspect of an absolute mind, has repeatedly been formulated as a viable option. Thinkers have also enunciated communitarian idealism—that one or another aggregate of finite minds defines reality. But there has been a long circuitous march from a religious to a secular vision of the universe. In America this march has taken a longer time than in other Western cultures. One might presume that the march would diminish the role of the mental, a term often a step away from the spiritual or religious. But despite the growing emphasis on the nonreligious, the deference to one or another kind of idealism has meant in America that realism—the view that physical objects at least exist independently of mind—has often been on the defensive, although a constant option. The eccentric journey away from religion has meant the relatively slow growth of what is often thought to be realism's cousin, materialism—that monistic position opposed to idealism, stipulating that the mental world can be reduced to the physical. More to the point, idealism and a defense of science have often coincided. Philosophers have regularly conceded that scientific investigation could easily but erroneously combine with materialism, but they have usually argued that only some sort of idealism can preserve scientific priorities. The varieties of idealism have also been characterized by a strong voluntaristic component: the will, volition, and the propensity to act have been crucial in defining the mental or the conscious. The Era of Jonathan EdwardsIn the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, people in America known formally as philosophers were part of a wider dialogue that had three major components. Most important were parish ministers, primarily in New England, who wrote on theology and participated in a conversation that embraced a religious elite in England and Scotland, and later Germany. These clerics expounded varieties of Calvinist Protestantism. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was the most influential and talented member of this ministerial group, which later included Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). But the latter two lived at a time when such thinkers were deserting their congregations and turning away from traditional Protestant doctrine. The second major component of American speculative thought was located in the seminaries that grew up in the Northeast, the South, and the old Midwest throughout the nineteenth century. These institutions, often independent entities not connected to American colleges, were—aside from law and medical schools—the only places where an aspiring young man could receive instruction beyond what an undergraduate received; they arose to train a professional ministry. The specialists in theology at these centers gradually took over the role played by the more erudite ministry. Leonard Woods (1774–1854) of Andover Theological Seminary, Henry Ware (1764–1845) of the Harvard Divinity School, Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858) of the Yale Divinity School, Charles Hodge (1797–1878) of the Princeton Theological Seminary, and Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900) of Andover belong to this cadre. Among these institutions Yale was primary. The divinity school theologians had the major power base in the nineteenth century. They trained the ministers and controlled much learned publication. Their outlook tended to be more narrow and sectarian than that of those speculators who were not professors of divinity, but it is difficult to argue that they were not the intellectual equals of those outside the divinity schools. A final group were actually known as philosophers; they were the holders of chairs in mental, moral, or intellectual philosophy in the American colleges of the nineteenth century. Their function was to support theoretically the more clearly religious concerns of the divinity school theologians and the most serious ministers on the hustings. The philosophers were inevitably ministers and committed Protestants themselves, but in addition to showing that reason was congruent with faith, they also wrote on the grounds of the social order and politics and commented on the affairs of the world. Frequently the presidents of their institutions, they had captive student audiences and easy access to publication. Worthies here include Francis Bowen (1811–1890) of Harvard, James McCosh (1811–1894) of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and Noah Porter (1811–1892) of Yale, again the leading educator of philosophical students. This philosophical component of the speculative tradition was provincial. Until after the Civil War, the American college was a small, sleepy institution, peripheral to the life of the nation. It leaders, including philosophers, participated in the shaping of public discourse but were generally undistinguished. Their libraries were inadequate, their education mediocre, and the literary culture in which they lived sentimental and unsophisticated. Europe barely recognized these philosophers, except when they went there to study. Yet the philosophers found senior partners in transatlantic conversations and were on an intellectual par with American clergymen and divinity school theologians. The intersecting dialogues among amateurs, divinity school theologians, and college philosophers focused on the ideas of Edwards, expressed in works like his Religious Affections (1746) and Freedom of the Will (1754). His ruminations on the moral responsibility of the solitary person confronting a sometimes angry, at least mysterious, deity controlled subsequent thinking, which tended to emphasize a priori deliberation about the fate of the individual soul. Indeed, the founding fathers of the Revolutionary and Constitutional period—men like Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), James Madison (1751–1836), Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), and John Adams (1735–1826)—were rarely considered philosophers. They had denigrated the study of theology, made politics primary, and grounded their thought in history and experience. PragmatismIn the last third of the nineteenth century the work of Darwin dealt a body blow to the religious orientation of American speculative endeavors. The primacy of divinity schools in the scholarly world ended, and the explicit Christian thought that governed intellectual life all but disappeared. At the same time, in the space of thirty years, many old American colleges were transformed into large, internationally recognized centers of learning, while new public and private universities commanded national attention. Students who a generation earlier would have sought "graduate" training in Europe, especially Germany, or in an American seminary, would by 1900 attend a postbaccalaureate program in an American university to obtain the Ph.D., the doctoral degree. Many of these students now found in philosophy what previously had been sought in the ministry or theological education. Those who, in the nineteenth century, had been a creative force outside the system of the divinity schools and the colleges, vanished as professional philosophers took their place. Among the first generation of university thinkers from 1865 to 1895, philosophical idealism was the consensus. At the end of the nineteenth century, one form of idealism—pragmatism—came to dominate the discourse of these thinkers. Pragmatism won out not only because its proponents were competent and well placed but also because they showed the philosophy's compatibility with the natural and social sciences and with human effort in the modern, secular world. A rich and ambiguous set of commitments, pragmatism associated mind with action and investigated the problems of knowledge through the practices of inquiry, tinting the physical world with intelligence and a modest teleology. Knowledge of the world was ascertainable, but the pragmatists did not define it as the intuitive grasp of a preexisting external object. Knowledge was rather our ability to adjust to an only semi hospitable environment. Beliefs were modes of action and true if they survived; experience competitively tested them. The pragmatists used Darwinian concepts in the service of philosophy. Nonetheless, at another level, pragmatism's use of Darwin permitted the reinstatement, in a chastened fashion, of beliefs that were religious if not Protestant. Pragmatists emphasized the way that ideas actually established themselves in communities of investigators and what their acceptance meant. If beliefs about the spiritual prospered, they were also true. In part, the world was what human beings collectively made of it. When most influential, pragmatism was a form of communitarian idealism. There were two main variants of pragmatism. One was associated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (a tradition that eventually extended to the end of the twentieth century). It included Charles Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), Josiah Royce (1855–1916), and later C. I. Lewis (1883–1964), Nelson Goodman (1906–1998), W. V. Quine (1908–2000), Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), and Hilary Putnam (1926–). This group of thinkers made mathematics, logic, and the physical sciences the model of inquiry, although William James, the most influential of them, famously held that science and religion were similarly justified and could each be defended. The second variant of pragmatism was called "instrumentalism" by its leading light, John Dewey (1859–1952). Dewey's vision inspired a school of thinkers at the University of Chicago, where he taught in the 1890s, and shaped the intellectual life of New York City and its universities—New York University, City College of New York, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia—after he moved to Columbia in 1904. Instrumentalism in Chicago and New York took the social sciences as the model of inquiry and, especially in the person of Dewey, was far more interested in social and political issues than the pragmatism of Harvard. While the philosophers in this period wrote for their own learned journals, they also contributed to the leading non-religious journals of opinion such as The Nation and The New Republic. Through the first third of the twentieth century, philosophy rationalized the work of the scholarly disciplines that promised solutions to the problems of life for which religion had previously offered only consolation. Public speaking went from ministerial exhortation to normative social-science reformism. This mix of the popular and the professorial in what is called the "golden age" of philosophy in America extended from the 1890s until Dewey's retirement in 1929. It gave philosophy its greatest influence and public import and produced a series of notable works—among them Peirce's essays in the Popular Science Monthly of 1877–1878, James's Pragmatism (1907), and Dewey's Quest for Certainty (1929). Professional PhilosophyAlthough variants of pragmatism were never absent from discussion, in the second third of the twentieth century a number of vigorous academics conducted a refined epistemological critique of the empirical bases of knowledge. Pragmatic assumptions were called into question. C. I. Lewis of Harvard in Mind and the World-Order (1929) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) of the University of Pittsburgh in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956) were regarded as the preeminent writers in this area. The intellectual migration from Europe caused by the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s contributed to this argument when a uniquely stringent empiricism, logical positivism, made an impact on the debate after World War II. The United States became known for its "analytic philosophy, " which emphasized clarity and precision of thought, often using logic and the foundations of mathematics to make its points, denigrating much "normative" reasoning in the areas of social and moral philosophy, and presupposing an apolitical sensibility. Leading philosophers in the United States were secular in their commitments, but in a culture still oriented to Judeo-Christian belief, they turned away from the civic sphere. These developments gave American thought worldwide honor in circles of scholars, but came at great cost to the public presence of philosophy and even to its audience in the academy. In contrast to what philosophy had been, both in and outside the university, during the period of James, Royce, and Dewey, philosophy after World War II had narrow concerns; it became a complex and arcane area of study in the university system. The 1960s accentuated the new academic status of philosophy. The radicalism and spirit of rebellion surrounding the Vietnam War condemned professional thought as irrelevant. In the last quarter of the century a cacophony of voices competed for attention in the world of philosophy. A most influential movement still had a connection to Cambridge, originating in the "pragmatic analysis" developed after World War II by Goodman and Quine. This movement was often materialistic in its premises but also skeptical of all claims to knowledge, including scientific ones. The pragmatic analysts had an uneasy connection to an extraordinary publication of 1962, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although Kuhn's work was ambiguous, it soon justified a much more romantic attack on the objectivity of science and on the pursuit of analytic philosophy itself. The publications of Richard Rorty (1931–) in the last twenty years of the century, especially Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), gave a deeper philosophical justification for these ideas, as many philosophers in philosophy departments rejected straitened approaches to their field without being able to assert a compelling vision of another sort. Moreover, scholars in other disciplines—most importantly in English departments—claimed that traditional philosophy had reached a dead end. These nondisciplinary philosophers challenged philosophers for the right to do philosophy. These developments took American philosophy from the high point of achievement and public influence of the "classic" pragmatists to a confused and less potent role at the end of the twentieth century. BIBLIOGRAPHYBrent, Joseph. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Clendenning, John. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce. Rev. ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Feigl, Herbert, and Wilfrid Sellars, eds. Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949. Kuklick, Bruce. Philosophy in America: An Intellectual and Cultural History, 1720–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A comprehensive survey. Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949. The first and still the most influential of modern works on Edwards. Muelder, Walter G., Laurence Sears, and Anne V. Schlabach, eds. The Development of American Philosophy: A Book of Readings. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Perry, Ralph. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. Still the authoritative work. Rorty, Richard, M., ed. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998. The most recent of many biographies. Stuhr, John J. ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretative Essays. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Press, 1991. BruceKuklick See alsoExistentialism ; Positivism ; Post-structuralism ; Pragmatism ; Religious Thought and Writings ; Transcendentalism . |
|
|
Cite this article
"Philosophy." Dictionary of American History. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Philosophy." Dictionary of American History. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401803245.html "Philosophy." Dictionary of American History. 2003. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401803245.html |
|
Philosophy
PhilosophyTHE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY THE RELEVANCE OF PHILOSOPHY TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Philosophy is the systematic inquiry into fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and behavior. As an academic discipline, philosophy has three central areas of inquiry and a number of other related subdisciplines that follow from these three areas. The three core areas are metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Other important branches of philosophy include logic, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, aesthetics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Each of these areas can be further broken down into subspecialties; so for instance, the philosophy of science includes the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of math, the philosophy of the social sciences, and so on. Furthermore, given what is generally taken to be the systematic nature of philosophical inquiry, the boundaries between the different areas of study and how each area relates to others are themselves matters of some disagreement. Is the philosophy of science to be regarded as a subdiscipline of epistemology or as a separate area of study? What is the relation of the philosophy of mind to metaphysics, on the one hand, and to the philosophy of psychology, on the other? What is the relation of political philosophy to ethics and to the philosophy of law, and should all of these areas be considered subdisciplines under a broader rubric such as value theory? Indeed, most philosophers would agree that the question “what is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical issue about which there is no one accepted answer, regardless of whether philosophy is taken as a method of inquiry, a way of understanding and living in the world, or as an academic discipline. THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHYPerhaps, then, a better way of characterizing philosophy is in terms of the fundamental questions that concern the three core areas. Metaphysics traditionally asks questions about the fundamental nature of reality. What really exists? What are the fundamental constituents of reality? Are there two (or more) fundamental and mutually irreducible substances, for instance, mind and matter? What is the nature of identity, of causation, and of time? How should we characterize the difference between persons and bodies? Metaphysical questions cross over into what might seem to be other areas of philosophy. For instance, the question of the existence of God is a metaphysical question that is at the heart of the philosophy of religion. Likewise, the metaphysical question of the relation of mind and body has traditionally been the central focus of the philosophy of mind. One might regard questions about the nature of truth as metaphysical, but the nature of truth is a central concern in both the philosophy of language and logic. The problems of freedom and determinism and the nature of freedom are generally taken to fall within metaphysics, but they have obvious and important implications for ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, what it is, and how we acquire it. What can we know? What are the limits of knowledge? Can we really know anything? Or is skepticism of some variety true? If we cannot know anything, if genuine knowledge (in a particular domain or in general) is impossible for humans, then some sort of skepticism must be the case. The traditional challenge of the skeptic going back at least as far as Plato is to the assertion that we are justified in claiming to know something (in particular or in general as the case may be), the claim to have secure knowledge. So the options, in a crude and simplified way, are between having secure knowledge or skepticism. What is the difference between mere belief and knowledge? Is true belief the same as knowledge? Is there a fundamental difference between empirical knowledge and knowledge of a priori entities such as concepts and numbers? Questions about the nature of justification and justified belief, as opposed to mere opinion, also are part of epistemology. Some questions are both epistemological and metaphysical. Such questions often have to do with the nature of perception. For example, the question of the relation of appearance to reality, that is, of how the world appears to us versus how it really is in itself, is at once both a question in epistemology (what we can know of how the world really is) and metaphysics (the nature of the real). Hovering over these epistemological concerns are questions about rationality and what it means to be, think, and act rationally. The concept of rationality might be taken to be in part epistemological and in part metaphysical, but it also is important in normative domains such as ethics and in logic. Ethics, or moral philosophy, has three traditional questions at its core: How should one live? What is the good? What is the right? These questions have to do with, in turn, the nature of virtue, value, and duty or right action. One can approach ethics, as the Greeks typically did, by thinking about the first question: how a person should live. What is the proper or best life for a human being? What kind of person should I be? What kind of virtues or disposition of character should I attempt to cultivate in myself? Answering these questions allows one to determine what is good (what adds value to a life) and what is right (what duties one has and how one should act in certain situations). In the modern period, philosophers have typically started with one of the other questions and moved from it to the other two concerns. One approach, consequentialism including utilitarianism, starts with a theory of the good or what has value, and then determines right action in terms of what will bring the most good into the world. Virtues are understood as those character traits that will help one best promote the good. The other major approach, often called deontology, starts with a theory of duty or right action. Certain actions are taken to be dutiful or right because of some feature they possess. The good is understood in terms of the promotion of such actions, or if there is an independent theory of the good, promoting the good is seen as subservient to doing one’s duty. A third contemporary approach, virtue theory or neo-Aristotlelianism, attempts to revive the approach of the Greeks and make virtue the fundamental normative concept. These questions are all considered part of normative ethics, or the theory of how one should act. When these sorts of questions are asked of specific sorts of cases or problems, normative ethics shades into applied ethics, which includes a number of subfields such as medical ethics or bioethics, environmental ethics, and business ethics. Another important area of ethical inquiry is metaethics, or the theory of the nature of ethics. Metaethics is the inquiry into metaphysical and epistemological issues about normative ethics and the nature of moral language. Metaethical issues include questions about the nature of value and truth in ethics; epistemological issues about ethical judgments such as whether ethical assertions admit of truth, how we can come to have knowledge in ethics, and the nature of justification in ethics; and philosophy of language concerns about the nature of specifically moral language such as the moral ought and good. The discipline of philosophy as practiced in the English-speaking world and most of Europe is primarily the tradition of the West starting with the Greeks. Non-Western traditions, including Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, African philosophy, and Islamic philosophy, receive some attention but remain largely on the margins of the field. In the twentieth century, a major and rather complicated division developed in European philosophy between two schools or approaches to the subject generally known as Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. Both approaches share the same history of the discipline, even with somewhat different readings of certain figures such as Immanuel Kant until at least Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Analytic tradition sees its specific roots in Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century, whereas the Continental tradition traces its origins to such figures as Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. The Continental tradition includes such philosophical subdisciplines as phenomenology, existentialism, and postmodernism. By the middle of the twentieth century the Analytic approach was dominant in Anglo-American philosophy, and the Continental approach held sway in France, Germany, and most of Western Europe. Unlike many disciplines, in particular the natural sciences, the history of philosophy is itself an important field within philosophy. Although the history of physics might be of some interest to physicists, most would not consider it an important field of current research or inquiry within physics. Philosophers, however, regard some mastery of the history of their discipline as an essential part of current work in most areas of philosophy. More than in most other subjects, philosophers recognize that how one tells the history of the field often affects how one understands the very nature of the problems that seem of greatest contemporary interest. Discussions of the major figures in the history of Western philosophy such as Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, David Hume, Kant, and John Stuart Mill are directly relevant to current work in ethics, epistemology, and many areas of metaphysics so much so that positions in current debates are often labeled as Kantian or Humean or Cartesian. THE RELEVANCE OF PHILOSOPHY TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCESHistorically, the social sciences have either been offshoots of philosophy or very closely connected to philosophical discussions. In some sense the social sciences have their roots, as do the natural sciences, in Greek thought. Plato and Aristotle can lay claim to being the first political scientists and economists. Not until the modern period, however, starting with seventeenth-century figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico, did the social sciences begin to emerge in their modern form. Still, it was only in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century that thinking about the nature of society and social behavior began to be seen as an area of investigation separable from thinking about the deep normative issues of ethics and political philosophy. The great figures regarded as among the fathers of modern social science such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and William James were all trained in philosophy. Only in the twentieth century, largely as a result of the influence of positivism and the specialization of the academy, did a split between the investigation of the nature of social life and processes and the traditional concerns of philosophy clearly emerge. A subdiscipline of contemporary philosophy of particular relevance to the social sciences is the philosophy of the social sciences. A central question of this subdiscipline concerns how to situate the social sciences in relation to the other disciplines. To what degree should the social sciences on the model of the natural sciences, such as physics, be understood? Or should they rather be viewed as closer to the humanities? Or should the social sciences be regarded as different in important respects from both the natural sciences and the humanities? Part of the difficulty in answering this question is that the social sciences span a broad spectrum of types and areas of investigation, from the study of the mind and of individual behavior in different arenas of social existence such as the economic or political, to understanding alien cultures, to social and political theory on the broadest scale. Can one expect to find epistemological, metaphysical, or methodological unity across all areas of investigation that are generally regarded as social sciences? Still, there are central questions that remain at the core of philosophical interest in the social sciences. Since the Greeks, philosophers have speculated about whether society and the institutional norms and rules that govern human life are natural or the result of convention. Thinking about this question leads naturally into questions about diverse cultures and to epistemological and methodological issues concerning how one understands alien cultures. These questions about the nature of foreign cultures and the possibility of our understanding cultures different from our own are central to anthropology and the philosophy of anthropology, a subfield of the philosophy of the social sciences. A different, but related, epistemological issue concerns how we explain social behavior. The standard model of explanation in the natural sciences is causal explanation. This model assumes that there are lawlike generalizations in terms of which we can understand particular occurrences or phenomena. But are there comparable laws or generalizations in the social sciences, especially that hold across cultures? Many doubt that there are. Alternatively, some have tried to attempt to explain social phenomena in terms of functional explanation, where the explanation appears to be in terms of the effects brought about rather than the causes of those effects. There are, however, serious questions about the relation of causal and functional explanation. A third important position holds that neither causal nor functional explanation is appropriate in the social sciences. Rather, the goal of the social sciences is understanding in the sense of the recovery of the meaning of individual or social behavior and phenomena from the point of view of the agents themselves. This debate has traditionally been referred to as that between Eklaren (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding). Another central debate in the philosophy of the social sciences concerns the relation of social structures, institutions, and practices on the one hand, and individual behavior and meaning on the other. Can all social phenomena be reduced to the aggregation of individual behaviors and meanings, in which case the goal of the social sciences should be to explain everything on the level of the individual? Or is the social ultimately irreducible to the level of the individual? In the latter case, the social sciences, or at least some of them, seem to occupy a conceptual space separate from the natural sciences, psychology, and the humanities. The position that holds that reduction of the social to the individual is possible and epistemologically required can be called methodological individualism. The position that resists this reduction and holds for a separate conceptual space for the social can, accordingly, be referred to as methodological holism. One final and important issue should be mentioned: the relation of fact and value in the social sciences. The natural sciences are concerned with facts, the facts out of which the world is constructed, and regard themselves and are generally regarded as value neutral. The relation of fact and value is much more problematic in the social sciences in at least two ways. Although natural science can be used in ways that might be judged good or bad, social scientists more often seem to bring value judgments and commitments to their work, making it harder to separate purely scientific judgments from value judgments. On a more basic philosophical level, there is a question about whether the very subject matter of the social sciences can be constituted independently of values. Although some hold that all theory, regardless of whether it is in the natural or social sciences, is value-laden, those in the natural sciences have traditionally thought of themselves as concerned with a realm of fact independent of values. Whether there are social facts with anything similar to the same degree of value independence has long been and remains a much more controversial claim. The constitution of social facts may inescapably involve normative assumptions, in which case the object domain of the social sciences would be significantly different from that of the natural sciences. SEE ALSO Aristotle; Epistemology; Ethics; Hobbes, Thomas; Hume, David; James, William; Kant, Immanuel; Knowledge; Marx, Karl; Meaning; Meta-Analysis; Mill, John Stuart; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Philosophy of Science; Philosophy, Moral; Philosophy, Political; Plato; Positivism; Reality; Reductionism; Revolutions, Scientific; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Science; Smith, Adam; Social Science; Weber, Max BIBLIOGRAPHYAudi, Robert. 2002. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Cutrofello, Andrew. 2005. Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge. Darwall, Stephen. 1998. Philosophical Ethics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Grayling, Anthony C., ed. 1995. Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grayling, Anthony C., ed. 1998. Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject, Vol 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kagan, Shelly. 1997. Normative Ethics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Kim, Jaegwon. 2005. Philosophy of Mind. Boulder, CO: Westview. Root, Michael. 1993. Philosophy of Social Science. Oxford: Blackwell. Rosenberg, Alexander. 1995. Philosophy of Social Science. Boulder, CO: Westview. Stroll, Avrum. 2001. Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Inwagen, Peter. 2002. Metaphysics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Lawrence H. Simon |
|
|
Cite this article
"Philosophy." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Philosophy." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045301941.html "Philosophy." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2008. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045301941.html |
|
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. Daniel J. Wilson |
|
|
Cite this article
Paul S. Boyer. "Philosophy." The Oxford Companion to United States History. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. Paul S. Boyer. "Philosophy." The Oxford Companion to United States History. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-Philosophy.html Paul S. Boyer. "Philosophy." The Oxford Companion to United States History. 2001. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-Philosophy.html |
|
philosophy
philosophy [Gr.,=love of wisdom], study of the ultimate reality, causes, and principles underlying being and thinking. It has many aspects and different manifestations according to the problems involved and the method of approach and emphasis used by the individual philosopher. This article deals with the nature and development of Western philosophical thought. Eastern philosophy, while founded in religion, contains rigorously developed systems; for these, see Buddhism ; Confucianism ; Hinduism ; Islam ; Jainism ; Shinto ; Taoism ; Vedanta ; and related articles.
|
|
|
Cite this article
"philosophy." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2011. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "philosophy." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2011. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-philsphy.html "philosophy." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2011. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-philsphy.html |
|
philosophy
philosophy Study of the nature of reality, knowledge, ethics and existence by means of rational inquiry. The oldest known philosophical system is the Vedic system of India, which dates back to the middle of the 2nd millennium bc or earlier. Like other Eastern philosophies, it is founded upon a largely mystical view of the universe and is integrated with India's main religion, Hinduism. From the 6th century bc, Chinese philosophy was largely dominated by Confucianism and Taoism. Also in the 6th century, Western philosophy began among the Greeks with the work of Thales of Miletus. Later pre-Socratic philosophers included Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Zeno of Elea and Democritus. Greek philosophy reached its high point with Socrates, who laid the foundations of ethics; Plato, who developed a system of universal ideas; and Aristotle, who founded the study of logic. Zeno of Citium evolved the influential school of Stoics, which contrasted with the system of Epicureanism, founded by Epicurus. A dominant school of the early Christian era was Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus in the 3rd century ad. The influence of Aristotle and other Greeks pervaded the thought of Muslim philosophers, such as Avicenna and Averroës, and the Spanish-born Jew, Moses Maimonides. In the work of scholastic philosophers, such as Abélard, Albertus Magnus, Saint Thomas Aquinas and William of Occam, philosophy became a branch of Christian theology. Modern scientific philosophy began in the 17th century with the work of Descartes. His faith in mathematics was taken up by Leibniz. In England, Hobbes integrated his materialist world view with a social philosophy. In the 18th century, empiricism was developed by Berkeley and Hume. The achievements of Kant in Germany and the French Encyclopedists were also grounded in science. In the 19th century, a number of diverging movements emerged, among them the classical idealism of Hegel, the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, the positivism of Comte, and the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which emphasized the freedom of the individual. In the 20th century, dominant movements included existentialism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and vitalism. See also aesthetics; Enlightenment; epistemology; logic; materialism; metaphysics; pragmatism; scholasticism; utilitarianism
|
|
|
Cite this article
"philosophy." World Encyclopedia. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "philosophy." World Encyclopedia. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O142-philosophy.html "philosophy." World Encyclopedia. 2005. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O142-philosophy.html |
|
philosophy
philosophy As an intellectual activity, philosophy is the most broad-ranging of the academic disciplines, since it addresses a wide range of interlinked questions about the nature of understanding, logic, language, and causality, many of which occur in the various other sciences. The sociologist is most likely to encounter philosophical debate in the fields of epistemology and ethics—both of which branches of philosophy are dealt with elsewhere in this dictionary.
The philosophy of the social sciences is a recognized specialism among sociologists, and asks questions about (among other things) the processes of concept-formation, the relationships between theory and evidence, the place of values, nature of motivation, role of language, and the nature of proof in the social sciences generally and sociology in particular. Again, many of the most significant arguments and most influential schools of thought concerning these issues have been treated separately, as discrete items in this dictionary. It has sometimes been argued that much of what passes as sociological theory (for example in the works of Anthony Giddens) is actually social philosophy, since it consists mainly of metaphysical speculation about the human condition, rather than concrete or testable propositions about social life. However, this is probably a minority view, although there is quite widespread agreement that sociology has in the past (most obviously during the 1960s) suffered from an excessive reflexivity and obsession with exploring the epistemological foundations of the discipline. See also HISTORIOGRAPHY; METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM. |
|
|
Cite this article
GORDON MARSHALL. "philosophy." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. GORDON MARSHALL. "philosophy." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-philosophy.html GORDON MARSHALL. "philosophy." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-philosophy.html |
|
Philosophy
PhilosophyFor discussion of the philosophy of science and its relationship to the social sciences, seeScience, article onthe philosophy of science; also relevant are the articlesCausation; Positivism; ScientificExplanation; and the biographies ofBacon; Cassirer; Cohen; Dewey; Husserl; James; Peirce; Schlick; Schutz; Whitehead. The philosophy of history is discussed inHistory, article onthe philosophy of history; and in the biographies OfCroce; DlLthey; Hegel; Hume; Marx; Simmel; Sorokin; Spengler; Vico. Articles that deal with other aspects of philosophy areEthics, article onethical systems and social structures; Political theory; Utilitarianism. The relevance to the social sciences of certain major figures in the history of philosophy is discussed in the biographies ofAquinas; Aristotle; Augustine; Bentham; Descartes; Hegel; Hobbes; Hume; Kant; Locke; Mlll; Spinoza. |
|
|
Cite this article
"Philosophy." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1968. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Philosophy." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1968. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045000939.html "Philosophy." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1968. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3045000939.html |
|
philosophy
phi·los·o·phy / fəˈläsəfē/ • n. (pl. -phies) the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, esp. when considered as an academic discipline.See also natural philosophy. ∎ a set of views and theories of a particular philosopher concerning such study or an aspect of it: a clash of rival socialist philosophies. ∎ the study of the theoretical basis of a particular branch of knowledge or experience: the philosophy of science. ∎ a theory or attitude held by a person or organization that acts as a guiding principle for behavior: don't expect anything and you won't be disappointed, that's my philosophy. ORIGIN: Middle English: from Old French philosophie, via Latin from Greek philosophia ‘love of wisdom.’ |
|
|
Cite this article
"philosophy." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "philosophy." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-philosophy.html "philosophy." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-philosophy.html |
|
philosophy
philosophy There has always been a tendency in Christian thought which is suspicious of philosophy and human reasoning. Paul (1 Cor. 1: 16 ff.) denigrated wisdom: it had no power to save, compared with the ‘foolishness of the cross’. In modern times the classical expression of the view that God is known only by his self-revelation in Christ and not as a concept demonstrable by philosophical argument was in Karl Barth's commentary on Paul's epistle to the Romans (1919; ET 1933).
However, a more conciliatory exegesis of the Bible took contemporary philosophy seriously at Alexandria. Clement and Origen admitted crudity and lack of credibility in biblical narratives, though they were opposed by those like Tertullian who could see only a literal meaning in the texts and asked ‘What has Jerusalem in common with Athens?’ |
|
|
Cite this article
W. R. F. BROWNING. "philosophy." A Dictionary of the Bible. 1997. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. W. R. F. BROWNING. "philosophy." A Dictionary of the Bible. 1997. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O94-philosophy.html W. R. F. BROWNING. "philosophy." A Dictionary of the Bible. 1997. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O94-philosophy.html |
|
Philosophy
507. Philosophy
|
|
|
Cite this article
"Philosophy." Allusions--Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. 1986. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Philosophy." Allusions--Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. 1986. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2505500516.html "Philosophy." Allusions--Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. 1986. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2505500516.html |
|
Philosophy
PHILOSOPHY.This entry includes two subentries: Historical Overview and Recent DevelopmentsRelations to Other Intellectual Realms |
|
|
Cite this article
"Philosophy." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Philosophy." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424300588.html "Philosophy." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2005. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424300588.html |
|
philosophy
philosophy •daffy, taffy
•Amalfi
•Cavafy, Gaddafi
•Effie
•beefy, Fifi, leafy
•cliffy, iffy, jiffy, Liffey, niffy, sniffy, spiffy, squiffy, stiffy, whiffy
•salsify
•coffee, toffee
•wharfie
•Sophie, strophe, trophy
•Dufy, goofy, Sufi
•fluffy, huffy, puffy, roughie, roughy, scruffy, snuffy, stuffy, toughie
•comfy • atrophy
•anastrophe, catastrophe
•calligraphy, epigraphy, tachygraphy
•dystrophy, epistrophe
•autobiography, bibliography, biography, cardiography, cartography, chirography, choreography, chromatography, cinematography, cosmography, cryptography, demography, discography, filmography, geography, hagiography, historiography, hydrography, iconography, lexicography, lithography, oceanography, orthography, palaeography (US paleography), photography, pornography, radiography, reprography, stenography, topography, typography
•apostrophe
•gymnosophy, philosophy, theosophy
•furphy, murphy, scurfy, surfy, turfy
|
|
|
Cite this article
"philosophy." Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes. 2007. Encyclopedia.com. 27 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "philosophy." Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes. 2007. Encyclopedia.com. (May 27, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O233-philosophy.html "philosophy." Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes. 2007. Retrieved May 27, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O233-philosophy.html |
|
|
Search over 100 encyclopedias and dictionaries:
HighBeam™ Research, Inc. © Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
The Encyclopedia.com advertising network includes:
