American philosophy

Not to be confused with Indigenous American philosophy or Latin American philosophy.

"North American philosophy" redirects here. For Canadian philosophy, see Philosophy in Canada.

American philosophy is the activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophy produced by American people. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while it lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and shaping collective American identity over the history of the nation". The Ivy League colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have long been influential.

Colonial America was influenced by the Puritan thought of Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards. The philosophy of the American Revolution and Founding Fathers of the United States such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson is largely seen as an extension of the European Enlightenment. A small number of philosophies are known as uniquely American in origin, namely pragmatism and transcendentalism, with their most prominent proponents being the philosophers William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson respectively.

American philosophy since the 20th century is mostly analytic philosophy. Some of the most prominent American analytic philosophers are W. V. O. Quine and Saul Kripke.

17th century

See also: 17th-century philosophy

Although there had been various Indian tribes (see Indigenous American philosophy) inhabiting the territories that would later become the United States, most histories of the American philosophical tradition have traditionally begun with European colonization, especially with the arrival of the Puritans in New England.

Documents such as the Mayflower Compact (1620), followed by the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), made manifest basic socio-political positions, which served as foundations for the newly established communities. These set the early colonial philosophy into a religious tradition (Puritan Providentialism), and there was also an emphasis on the relationship between the individual and the community.

Cotton Mather

Thinkers such as John Winthrop emphasized the public life over the private. Holding that the former takes precedence over the latter, while other writers, such as Roger Williams (co-founder of Rhode Island) held that religious tolerance was more integral than trying to achieve religious homogeneity in a community.

Robert Calef wrote More Wonders of the Invisible World denouncing the recent Salem witch trials of 1692–1693 and particularly the role played by Cotton Mather, and the defense of his actions published in Wonders of the Invisible World. Cotton Mather was an early advocate of inoculation for smallpox, and was deeply influenced by Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of Newtonianism. Mather worked on a grand intellectual project that he titled Biblia Americana, which sought to provide a commentary and interpretation of the Christian Bible in light of "all of the Learning in the World". Mather influenced Benjamin Franklin.

The first 100 years or so of college education in the American Colonies were dominated in New England by the Puritan theology of William Ames and "the sixteenth-century logical methods of Petrus Ramus."

18th century

See also: 18th-century philosophy

Samuel Johnson

Jonathan Edwards

The 18th century saw the introduction of modern philosophy, science (or natural philosophy), and the Enlightenment to colonial America. Two native-born Americans, Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards, were first influenced by these ideas; they then adapted and extended their Enlightenment ideas to develop their own American theology and philosophy. "These two brilliant Yale students of those years, each of whom was to become a noted thinker and college president, exposed the fundamental nature of the problem" of the "incongruities between the old learning and the new."

Both Johnson and Edwards were originally ordained Puritan Congregationalist ministers. But Edwards based his reformed Puritan theology on Calvinist doctrine, while Johnson converted to the Anglican episcopal religion (the Church of England), then based his new American moral philosophy on natural religion.

18th-century American philosophy before the Revolution may be broken into two halves, the first half being marked by the theology of Reformed Puritan Calvinism influenced by the Great Awakening as well as Enlightenment natural philosophy, and the second by the native moral philosophy of the American Enlightenment taught in American colleges. They were used "in the tumultuous years of the 1750s and 1770s" to "forge a new intellectual culture for the United states", which led to the political thought of the Founding Fathers.

Late in the century, the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment replaced the native schools of these two rivals in the college philosophy curricula of American colleges; it would remain the dominant philosophy in American academia up to the Civil War.

American Enlightenment

In 1714, a donation of 800 books from England, collected by Colonial Agent Jeremiah Dummer, arrived at Yale. They contained what became known as "The New Learning", including "the works of Locke, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Shakespeare", and other Enlightenment era authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard colleges. They were first opened and studied by an eighteen-year-old graduate student from Guilford, Connecticut, the young American Samuel Johnson, who had also just found and read Lord Francis Bacon's 1605 book Advancement of Learning. Johnson wrote in his Autobiography, "All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind" and that "he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day." He now considered what he had learned at Yale "nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street."

Johnson was appointed tutor at Yale in 1716. He began to teach the Enlightenment curriculum there, and thus began the American Enlightenment. Samuel Johnson has been called "The Founder of American Philosophy" and the "first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there". He was interested not only in philosophy and theology, but in theories of education, and in knowledge classification schemes, which he used to write encyclopedias, develop college curricula, and create library classification systems.

Bishop Berkeley visited America, and influenced both Johnson and Edwards.

Johnson was a proponent of the view that "the essence of true religion is morality", and believed that "the problem of denominationalism" could be solved by teaching a non-denominational common moral philosophy acceptable to all religions. Johnson's moral philosophy was influenced by Descartes and Locke, but more directly by William Wollaston's 1722 book Religion of Nature Delineated, and the subjective idealist and empiricist philosopher George Berkeley, with whom Johnson studied while Berkeley was living in Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731.

Reformed Christianity

Jonathan Edwards was "America's most important and original philosophical theologian." Noted for his energetic sermons, such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (which is said to have begun the First Great Awakening), Edwards emphasized "the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness."

Edwards was an associate of George Whitefield and was once a student of Samuel Johnson. Both Johnson and Edwards were deeply influenced by Berkeley. Edwards tried to unite a Christian Platonism with an empiricist epistemology, using the aid of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Newtonian physics.

For Edwards, there is an immaterial mind consisting of understanding and will, and it is understanding that leads to Edwards' fundamental notion of Resistance. Whatever features an object may have, it has these properties because the object resists. Resistance itself is the exertion of God's power, and it can be seen in Newton's laws of motion, where an object is "unwilling" to change its current state of motion; an object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion.

Though Edwards revised Puritan theology using Enlightenment ideas from Berkeley, Locke, and Newton, he remained a Calvinist (or Reformed Christian) and hard determinist believing in predestination. He rejected the freedom of the will, saying that "we can do as we please, but we cannot please as we please." According to Edwards, neither good works nor self-originating faith leads to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God which stands as the sole arbiter of human fortune.

American Practical Idealism

Johnson strongly rejected Calvin's doctrine of predestination and believed that people were endowed with free will and natural rights. His fusion of natural religion and idealism, which has been called "American Practical Idealism", was developed as a series of college textbooks in seven editions between 1731 and 1754. These works, and his dialogue Raphael, or The Genius of the English America, written at the time of the Stamp Act crisis, go beyond his Wollaston and Berkeley influences; Raphael includes sections on economics, psychology, the teaching of children, and political philosophy.

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky by Benjamin West

His moral philosophy is defined in his college textbook Elementa Philosophica as "the Art of pursuing our highest Happiness by the practice of virtue". It was promoted by President Thomas Clap of Yale, Benjamin Franklin and Provost William Smith at The Academy and College of Philadelphia, and taught at King's College (now Columbia University), which Johnson founded in 1754. These men "first created the idealistic moral philosophy of 'the pursuit of Happiness', and then taught it in American colleges to the generation of men who would become the Founding Fathers."

It was influential in its day: it has been estimated that about half of American college students between 1743 and 1776, and over half of the men who contributed to the Declaration of Independence or debated it were connected to Johnson's American Practical Idealism moral philosophy. In summary, "in the middle eighteenth century," it was "the collegians who studied" the ideas of the new learning and moral philosophy taught in the Colonial colleges who "created new documents of American nationhood."

Franklin's natural philosophy

The meaning of the term "philosophy" was not as narrowly circumscribed as it is today, and included science or natural philosophy, and the broad application of reason to well-being. Back in Europe, publisher Benjamin Franklin was considered America's "first philosopher." Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society in 1743.

Franklin was known for his aphorisms found in works like Poor Richard's Almanack. Franklin's philosophical vision was broadly pragmatic. To quote him, "What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use?"

In 1752, Franklin proved lightning and electricity were the same phenomenon with his famous Kite experiment, leading to the invention of the lightning rod.

Founders' political philosophy

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800

About the time of the Stamp Act, interest rose in civil and political philosophy. Many of the Founding Fathers wrote extensively on political issues, including John Adams, John Dickinson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. In continuing with the chief concerns of the Puritans in the 17th century, the Founding Fathers debated the interrelationship between God, the state, and the individual. Resulting from this were the United States Declaration of Independence, passed in 1776, and the United States Constitution, ratified in 1788. Much of the debate is found in the Federalist Papers.

Revolution

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government states government required the consent of the governed, and that an unjust ruler could be overthrown, thus providing a justification for resistance to King George III.

Jefferson had been taught philosophy by College of William & Mary's William Small. Thomas Jefferson hung portraits of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton at his home Monticello, "the three greatest men the world has ever produced." Jeffersonianism was a kind of republican agrarianism. An alternative philosophy was found in Hamilton, whose mercantilist ideas led to the American School.

Checks and balances

The Constitution sets forth a federal and republican form of government that is marked by a balance of powers accompanied by a checks and balances system between the three branches of government: a judicial branch, an executive branch led by the President, and a legislative branch composed of a bicameral legislature where the House of Representatives is the lower house and the Senate is the upper house. This was influenced especially by French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu.

Founders' religion

The First Prayer in Congress

Although the Declaration of Independence does contain references to the Creator, the God of Nature, Divine Providence, and the Supreme Judge of the World, the Founding Fathers were not exclusively theistic. Some professed personal concepts of deism, as was characteristic of other European Enlightenment thinkers, such as French philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau, or French Revolutionary Robespierre. They were at least influenced by the deistic tendencies of Wollaston's natural religion, as evidenced by "the Laws of Nature, and Nature's God" and "the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration.

However, an investigation of 106 contributors to the Declaration of Independence found that only two men (Franklin and Jefferson), both American Practical Idealists in their moral philosophy, might be called quasi-deists or non-denominational Christians; all the others were publicly members of denominational Christian churches. Even Franklin professed the need for a "public religion" and would attend various churches from time to time. Jefferson was vestryman at the evangelical Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville, Virginia, a church he himself founded and named in 1777, suggesting the influence of Edwards reached even into Virginia.

Thomas Paine, the English deist intellectual, pamphleteer, and revolutionary who wrote Common Sense and Rights of Man was an influential promoter of Enlightenment political ideas in America, though he was not a philosopher. Common Sense, which has been described as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era", provides justification for the American revolution and independence from the British Crown. Though popular in 1776, historian Pauline Maier cautions that, "Paine's influence was more modest than he claimed and than his more enthusiastic admirers assume."

Thomas Young, who named the state of Vermont, was another revolutionary American deist, for example influencing Ethan Allen, author of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man.

Scottish influence

John Witherspoon introduced Scottish philosophy to America

While it was not a strong influence at the time the Declaration was crafted, afterwards, the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment become an alternative to American Practical Idealism, and was the dominant moral philosophy in classrooms of American academia for almost 100 years.

The Scottish Enlightenment was introduced into American Colleges in 1768 by John Witherspoon, a Scottish immigrant and educator who was invited to be President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He was a Presbyterian minister and a delegate who joined the Continental Congress just days before the Declaration was debated.

His outlook was based on the work of the Scottish moral sense theorist and utilitarian Francis Hutcheson, who also influenced John Adams. When President Witherspoon arrived at the College of New Jersey in 1768, he expanded its natural philosophy offerings, purged the Berkeley adherents from the faculty, including Jonathan Edwards Jr., and taught his own Hutcheson-influenced form of Scottish moral philosophy.

The Scottish-American James Wilson was influenced by Thomas Reid's common sense realism and preferred Reid's justification for a people's right to rebel against an unjust ruler. Wilson felt Reid had shown Locke's representationalist views led to David Hume's skepticism. Witherspoon's successor Samuel Stanhope Smith was a dedicated follower of Reid and spread his ideas at Princeton.

Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in 1776, the classic statement of laissez-faire economics. His Theory of Moral Sentiments was also influential, along with Hutcheson.

19th century

See also: 19th-century philosophy

The 19th century saw the rise of Romanticism in America. The American incarnation of Romanticism was transcendentalism. The 19th century also saw the rise of the school of pragmatism. Both are considered uniquely American.

The 19th century also saw the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, Jacksonian democracy was influenced by Jefferson's philosophy. Jefferson influenced John C. Calhoun led the states' rights and pro-slavery faction. Calhoun was one of the Great Triumvirate dominating American politics in the first half of the 19th century, along with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson, c. 1857

Henry David Thoreau, 1856

American transcendentalism is marked by the holistic belief in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical, and an emphasis on subjective experience. It can be viewed as a reaction against modernism and intellectualism in general and the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview in particular. The transcendentalist writers all desired a deep return to nature, and believed that real, true knowledge is intuitive and personal and arises out of personal immersion and reflection in nature, not industrial progress and scientific advancement, nor the principles and prescriptions of traditional, organized religion.

The most notable transcendentalist writers were associated with Harvard and include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Emerson wrote Nature and in 1836 began the Transcendental Club with Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley. Margaret Fuller joined the next year. Vermonter James Marsh, who introduced the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant and German idealism to America, was read by the Transcendental Club.

Influenced by Emerson and the importance of nature, Charles Stearns Wheeler built a shanty at Flint's Pond in 1836. Considered the first Transcendentalist outdoor living experiment, Wheeler used his shanty during his summer vacations from Harvard from 1836 to 1842. Thoreau stayed at Wheeler's shanty for six weeks during the summer of 1837, and got the idea that he wanted to build his own cabin (later realized at Walden in 1845). Henry David Thoreau's 1854 book Walden; or, Life in the Woods shows his attempt to achieve transcendence through immersion in nature and the distancing of oneself from society.

George Fitzhugh

George Fitzhugh was a leading pro-slavery intellectual influenced by Thomas Carlyle who in his works Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857) rebuked John Locke, Adam Smith, and the entire liberal tradition, preferring feudalism.

Darwinism in America

William Graham Sumner

The release of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in his 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species had a strong impact on American philosophy. John Fiske and Chauncey Wright both wrote about and argued for the re-conceiving of philosophy through an evolutionary lens. They both wanted to understand morality and the mind in Darwinian terms, setting a precedent for evolutionary psychology and evolutionary ethics.

Darwin's biological theory was also integrated into the social and political philosophies of English thinker Herbert Spencer and American philosopher William Graham Sumner. Herbert Spencer, who coined the oft-misattributed term "survival of the fittest," believed that societies were in a struggle for survival, and that groups within society are where they are because of some level of fitness. This struggle is beneficial to human kind, as in the long run the weak will be weeded out and only the strong will survive. This position is often referred to as social Darwinism, though it is distinct from the eugenics movements with which social Darwinism is often associated. The laissez-faire beliefs of Sumner and Spencer do not advocate coercive breeding to achieve a planned outcome.

Social darwinism was also closely associated with classical liberalism. Sumner, much influenced by Spencer, believed along with the industrialist Andrew Carnegie that the social implication of the fact of the struggle for survival is that laissez-faire capitalism is the natural political-economic system and is the one that will lead to the greatest amount of well-being. William Sumner, in addition to his advocacy of free markets, also espoused anti-imperialism (having been credited with coining the term "ethnocentrism"), and advocated for the gold standard. In 1876, Sumner became the first to teach a course titled "sociology" in the English-speaking world.

Pragmatism

The most influential school of thought that is uniquely American is pragmatism. It began in the late nineteenth century in the United States, most notably with Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism begins with the idea that belief is that upon which one is willing to act. It holds that a proposition's meaning is the consequent form of conduct or practice that would be implied by accepting the proposition as true.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce, an American pragmatist, logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist

Harvard philosopher, logician, mathematician, scientist, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) coined the term "pragmatism" in the 1870s.

Peirce was a chemist and surveyor who read British philosopher Richard Whately, who started a revival in logic, in reaction to the anti-logical aspects of British empiricism. As a logician, Peirce was notable for pioneering the logic of relations (or relatives) and conceiving of logic gates.

Peirce's philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, combining a "critical common-sensism" (Scottish common sense realism plus fallibilism), with logic (including Peirce's semiotics, modes of inference, and methods of inquiry), as well as scholastic realism for universals, Christianity, objective idealism influenced by Kant, and belief in the reality of continuity, chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love as principles operative in the cosmos.

Peirce was a member of The Metaphysical Club, a conversational club of intellectuals that also included Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and William James. In addition to making profound contributions to semiotics (or the study of signs), logic, and mathematics, Peirce wrote what are considered to be the founding documents of pragmatism, "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878). In 1879, Peirce was appointed as logic lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce argues for the superiority of the scientific method in settling belief on theoretical questions. In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", Peirce harkens back to Descartes' notion of "clear and distinct ideas", and sums up pragmatism by what he called the pragmatic maxim: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". The theory is that the meaning of a concept is equivalent to its practical implications, as a method of experimentational mental reflection. Peirce coined the notion of abduction as distinct from induction and deduction.

In semiotics, the first two major theories are those of Peirce and Swiss theorist Ferdinand de Saussure. As a mathematician, Peirce was a founder of statistics.

C. I. Lewis wrote, "The contributions of C. S. Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer—at least in the nineteenth century." Paul Weiss wrote Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote Peirce "was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".

William James

William James, an American pragmatist and psychologist

William James (1842–1910) was "an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy." He is best known as the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, his monumental tome The Principles of Psychology, and his lecture "The Will to Believe." James was the most famous American philosopher of his time, and started Harvard's psychology department. He was the brother of novelist Henry James.

James, along with Peirce, saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes elaborated into a radical new philosophical method of clarifying ideas and thereby resolving dilemmas. In his 1910 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, James paraphrased Peirce's pragmatic maxim as follows:

[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.

He then went on to characterize pragmatism as promoting not only a method of clarifying ideas but also as endorsing a particular theory of truth. Peirce rejected this latter move by James, preferring to describe the pragmatic maxim only as a maxim of logic and pragmatism as a methodological stance, explicitly denying that it was a substantive doctrine or theory about anything, truth or otherwise. James rejected the correspondence theory of truth.

James is also known for his radical empiricism which holds that relations between objects are as real as the objects themselves. Later in his life, James would also come to adopt neutral monism, the view that the ultimate reality is of one kind, and is neither mental nor physical.

John Dewey

John Dewey

John Dewey (1859–1952) studied under Peirce at Johns Hopkins University. Dewey engaged in the academic philosophical work of James and Peirce before him, but also wrote extensively on political and social matters, and his presence in the public sphere was much greater than his pragmatist predecessors. In addition to being one of the founding members of pragmatism, John Dewey was one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading figure of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.

Dewey argued against the individualism of classical liberalism, asserting that social institutions are not "means for obtaining something for individuals. They are means for creating individuals." He held that individuals are not things that should be accommodated by social institutions, instead, social institutions are prior to and shape the individuals. These social arrangements are a means of creating individuals and promoting individual freedom.

Dewey is well known for his work in the applied philosophy of the philosophy of education. Dewey's philosophy of education is one where children learn by doing. Dewey believed that schooling was unnecessarily long and formal, and that children would be better suited to learn by engaging in real-life activities. For example, in math, students could learn by figuring out proportions in cooking or seeing how long it would take to travel distances with certain modes of transportation.

W. E. B. Du Bois, an American sociologist, historian, philosopher and social leader

George Herbert Mead

Besides Peirce, James, and Dewey, pragmatism proved influential for a number of thinkers. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was a pragmatist and sociologist influenced by Dewey and Charles Horton Cooley. Mead was known for his theory of symbolic interactionism and social behaviorism.

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), trained as a historian and sociologist, and described as a pragmatist like his professor William James, engaged in philosophy as social criticism. His contributions in philosophy, like his efforts in other fields, worked toward the goal of equality of colored people. In The Souls of Black Folk, he introduced the concept of double consciousness—the dual self-perception of African-Americans both through the lens of a white society and as they see themselves, with their own legitimate feelings and traditions—and in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, he introduced the concept of second sight—that this double consciousness of existing both inside the white world and outside of it provides a unique perspective from which to understand that society. He memorably debated eugenicist and white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard.

Idealism

Josiah Royce was America's most famous advocate of idealism.

Other schools of thought included the anti-materialism and American idealism of Harvard philosopher and Peirce student at Johns Hopkins Josiah Royce. As Royce puts it, "the world is...such stuff as ideas are made of."

Royce influenced the "personal idealism" or "California personalism" of George Holmes Howison, and the "Personalism," sometimes called "Boston personalism," of Borden Parker Bowne.

20th century

See also: 20th-century philosophy

The middle of the 20th century was witness to the increase in popularity of analytic philosophy in America. World War I and World War II crystalized the split between analytic and continental philosophy. Existentialism and phenomenology, while very popular in Europe in the 20th century, never achieved the level of popularity in America as they did in continental Europe.

Pragmatism continued its influence into the 20th century. C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) pioneered modal logic and was the founder of conceptual pragmatism. He was a Kantian who coined the term "qualia". His work in modal logic was extended by Ruth Barcan Marcus.

Rejection of idealism

Santayana

George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher

While there were still some 20th century idealists in America, like Brand Blanshard, idealism mostly fell out of favor, mirroring the British revolt against idealism. Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana was one of the leading proponents of pragmatism and realism in this period. He held that idealism entailed skepticism and was a rejection of common sense. According to Santayana, knowledge involved a sort of faith, which he termed "animal faith".

In his book Scepticism and Animal Faith he asserts that knowledge is not the result of reasoning. Instead, knowledge is what is required in order to act and successfully engage with the world. As a naturalist, Santayana was a harsh critic of epistemological foundationalism. The explanation of events in the natural world is within the realm of science, while the meaning and value of this action should be studied by philosophers.

New realism

Santayana was accompanied in the rejection of idealism by the thinkers of the New Realism movement, who criticized idealism as exhibiting what is called the egocentric predicament. The New Realists were six American scholars, most notably Ralph Barton Perry, but also Edwin Bissell Holt, Walter Taylor Marvin, William Pepperell Montague, Walter Boughton Pitkin, and Edward Gleason Spaulding.

Analytic philosophy

The middle of the 20th century was the beginning of the dominance of analytic philosophy and the "linguistic turn" in America. Analytic philosophy, prior to its arrival in America, had begun in Europe with the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. According to logical positivism, the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies, and those of science are empirically verifiable. Any other claim, including the claims of ethics, aesthetics, theology, metaphysics, and ontology, are meaningless (this theory is called verificationism). With the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, many logical positivists fled Germany to Britain and America, and this helped reinforce the dominance of analytic philosophy in the United States in subsequent years. However, while heavily influenced by logical positivism, ensuing American philosophy would see its demise.

Sellars' critical realism

Santayana was at one point aligned with early 20th-century American proponents of critical realism—such as Roy Wood Sellars—who were also critics of idealism, but Sellars later concluded that Santayana and Charles Augustus Strong were closer to New Realism in their emphasis on veridical perception, whereas Sellars and Arthur O. Lovejoy and James Bissett Pratt were more properly counted among the critical realists who emphasized "the distinction between intuition and denotative characterization". Critical realism was advanced by Sellars' son and Kant scholar Wilfrid Sellars, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Wilfrid Sellars criticism of the "Myth of the Given" challenged logical positivism. Sellars sought a synoptic philosophy uniting what he called the manifest and scientific images.

W. V. O. Quine

Quine's holism

Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine, while not a logical positivist, was educated by Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. Quine shared the view that philosophy should be like science in its pursuit of intellectual clarity and understanding of the world. However, he criticized the logical positivists and the analytic/synthetic distinction of knowledge in his 1951 essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," making him at the time the most famous philosopher in America.

Quine advocated for a "web of belief," which is a coherentist theory of justification. In Quine's epistemology, since no experiences occur in isolation, there is actually a holistic approach to knowledge where every belief or experience is intertwined with the whole.

Quine is also famous for inventing the term "gavagai" as part of his theory of the indeterminacy of translation. Quine also coined the terms abstract object and Plato's beard.

Kripke

Saul Kripke at Juquehy Beach

Saul Kripke, a student of Quine's at Harvard, has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, and subsequently became the most famous philosopher in America.

Kripke has several contributions to philosophy. He is known for Kripke semantics for modal and related logics, published in several essays beginning while he was still in his teens. His 1970 Princeton lectures Naming and Necessity (published in 1972 and 1980), introduced the concept of rigid designators and significantly restructured the philosophy of language and, as some have put it, "made metaphysics respectable again". He also has a novel skeptical interpretation of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and a notable theory of truth. He has also made important contributions to set theory (see admissible ordinal and Kripke–Platek set theory).

David Lewis

David Kellogg Lewis, another student of Quine at Harvard, is well known for his controversial advocacy of modal realism, the position which holds that there is an infinite number of concrete and causally isolated possible worlds, of which ours is one. These possible worlds arise in the field of modal logic.

Epistemology

Owing largely to Edmund Gettier's paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963) and the so-called Gettier problem, epistemology has since enjoyed a resurgence as a topic of analytic philosophy. Using epistemic luck, Gettier provided counterexamples to the "justified true belief" (JTB) definition of knowledge, found as early as Plato's dialogue Theaetetus. Roderick Chisholm, Fred Dretske, Nelson Goodman, and Norman Malcolm were also notable American epistemologists.

Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn was an important philosopher and writer who worked extensively in the fields of the history of science and the philosophy of science. He is famous for writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most cited academic works of all time. The book argues that science proceeds through different paradigms as scientists find new puzzles to solve. There follows a widespread struggle to find answers to questions, and a shift in world views occurs, which is referred to by Kuhn as a paradigm shift. The work is considered a milestone in the sociology of knowledge.

Process philosophy

Process philosophy embraces the physics of Einstein's theory of relativity, and its main proponents include the British Alfred North Whitehead and the American Charles Hartshorne. The core belief of process philosophy is the claim that events and processes are the principal ontological categories, rather than substances. Whitehead asserted in his book The Concept of Nature that the things in nature, what he referred to as "concresences" are a conjunction of events that maintain a permanence of character. Hartshorne was responsible for developing the process philosophy of Whitehead into process theology. American Paul Weiss also defended process philosophy.

Analytic political philosophy and ethics

Rawls

John Rawls

In 1971 John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, which puts forth his view of justice as fairness, a version of social contract theory. Rawls employs a conceptual mechanism called the veil of ignorance to outline his idea of the original position. In Rawls' philosophy, the original position is the correlate to the Hobbesian state of nature. While in the original position, persons are said to be behind the veil of ignorance, which makes these persons unaware of their individual characteristics and their place in society, such as their race, religion, wealth, etc. The principles of justice are chosen by rational persons while in this original position. The two principles of justice are the equal liberty principle and the principle that governs the distribution of social and economic inequalities. From this, Rawls argues for a system of distributive justice in accordance with the Difference Principle, which says that all social and economic inequalities must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.

Nozick

Viewing Rawls as promoting excessive government control and rights violations, libertarian Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. The book advocates for a minimal state and defends the liberty of the individual. He argues that the role of government should be limited to "police protection, national defense, and the administration of courts of law, with all other tasks commonly performed by modern governments – education, social insurance, welfare, and so forth – taken over by religious bodies, charities, and other private institutions operating in a free market."

Nozick asserts his view of the entitlement theory of justice, which says that if everyone in society has acquired his or her holdings in accordance with the principles of acquisition, transfer, and rectification, then any pattern of allocation, no matter how unequal the distribution may be, is just. The entitlement theory of justice holds that the "justice of a distribution is indeed determined by certain historical circumstances (contrary to end-state theories), but it has nothing to do with fitting any pattern guaranteeing that those who worked the hardest or are most deserving have the most shares."

Communitarianism

Alasdair MacIntyre, born and educated in the United Kingdom, spent around forty years living and working in the United States. A prominent Thomist political philosopher, MacIntyre held that "modern philosophy and modern life are characterized by the absence of any coherent moral code, and that the vast majority of individuals living in this world lack a meaningful sense of purpose in their lives and also lack any genuine community". He recommended returning to genuine political communities where individuals can properly acquire their virtues. MacIntyre defends this "communitarianism" as an alternative to both Rawls' and Nozick's political philosophies.

Ethics

Nozick criticized utilitarianism with the utility monster. Rawls and Thomas Nagel revitalized academic interest in deontology. A notable student of Rawls' moral philosophy is Christine Korsgaard. MacIntyre was partially responsible for the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, a moral theory first propounded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. As was Philippa Foot, who while also a British philosopher, was a granddaughter of American president Grover Cleveland.

Outside academic philosophy, the University of Chicago president Maynard Hutchins reformed the curriculum according to recommendations by Aristotelian Mortimer Adler. Adler also influenced Sister Miriam Joseph to teach her college students the medieval Trivium of liberal arts. Adler served as chief editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and later founded the Aspen Institute to teach business executives. Richard McKeon also taught Aristotle during the Hutchins era.

Civil rights

Also outside academic philosophy, political and social concerns took center stage with the Civil Rights Movement and the speech and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. King was an American Christian minister and activist known for advancing civil rights for people of color through nonviolence and civil disobedience.

Critical theory

Herbert Marcuse, a German-American critical theorist, was influential among New Left.

Critical theory—specifically the social theory of the Frankfurt School—influenced philosophy and culture in the United States beginning in the late 1960s. Critical theory was rooted in the Western European Marxist philosophical tradition that also fled Nazi Germany and sought philosophy that was "practical" and not merely "theoretical", that would help not only to understand the world but to shape it—generally toward human emancipation and freedom from domination. Its practical and socially transformative orientation was similar to that of earlier American pragmatists such as John Dewey.

Bell hooks best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class.

Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in his Eros and Civilization (1955), responded to the pessimism of Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents by arguing for the emancipatory power of the imagination and for a "rationality of gratification", a fusion of Logos and Eros, for envisioning a better world. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse argued for a "Great Refusal"—"the protest against that which is", in response to "un-freedoms" and oppressive, conformist social structures.

According to Marcuse's student Angela Davis, Marcuse's principled utopianism articulated the ideals of a generation of activists and revolutionaries around the world. His thought influenced the New Left, notably by the Black power movement and student movements of the 1960s. He "was the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on North American intellectual culture" according to Doug Mann.

American philosophers and writers who have engaged with critical theory include Angela Davis, Edward Said, Martha Nussbaum, bell hooks, Cornel West, and Judith Butler. Butler portrays critical theory as a way to rhetorically challenge oppression and inequality, specifically concepts of gender.

Feminism

Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique addressed issues facing white, middle class housewives and is regarded as a catalyst of the second wave of feminism in the U.S.

Judith Butler's 1990 book Gender Trouble argued for an understanding of gender as socially constructed and performative. Butler is associated with third wave feminism and queer theory.

See also: Feminism in the United States and History of feminism in the United States

While there were earlier writers who would be considered feminist, such as Sarah Grimké, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anne Hutchinson, the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as second-wave feminism, is notable for its impact in philosophy.

The popular mind was taken with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). This was accompanied by other feminist philosophers, such as Alicia Ostriker and Adrienne Rich. These philosophers critiqued basic assumptions and values like objectivity and what they believe to be masculine approaches to ethics, such as rights-based political theories. They maintained there is no such thing as a value-neutral inquiry and they sought to analyze the social dimensions of philosophical issues.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), which argued for an understanding of gender as socially constructed and performative, helped establish the academic field of gender studies.

Objectivism

Ayn Rand penned the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and remains a popular figure within American culture. These two novels gave birth to the Objectivist movement and would influence students, including a young Alan Greenspan, a self-described libertarian who would become Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Objectivism holds that there is an objective external reality that can be known with reason, ethical egoism, and that the proper form of economic organization is laissez-faire capitalism. Several academic philosophers are highly critical of the quality and intellectual rigor of Rand's work, preferring her work be labeled a kind of pseudo-philosophy.

Contemporary American analytic philosophy

The analytic philosopher Hilary Putnam made contributions to philosophy of the mind, language, mathematics, and science.

Neopragmatism

Towards the end of the 20th century, there was a resurgence of interest in pragmatism, known as neopragmatism. Largely responsible for this are Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. Rorty is famous as the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Philosophy and Social Hope. Hilary Putnam is well known for his quasi-empiricism in mathematics, his challenge of the brain in a vat thought experiment, and his other work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. Rorty influenced neopragmatists like black activist Cornel West. Other neopragmatists like foundherentist Susan Haack are highly critical of Rorty.

Other contemporary American scholars have renewed an interest in John Dewey's formulation of pragmatic ethics in order to explore the moral imperatives which justify an adherence to the practice of pacifism and nonviolence in the modern world. Specific attention is given to the ethical limitations and contradictions inherent in traditional just war theories when applied to modern forms of warfare including nuclear war and modern deterrence theory. Noteworthy in this group are Robert L. Holmes, Duane Cady and Barry L. Gan.

Philosophy of mind

The debates that occur within the philosophy of mind have taken center stage. Austrian émigré Herbert Feigl published a summary of the debates, "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'", in 1958 (with a postscript in 1967). Later, American philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, as well as Patricia and Paul Churchland continued the discussion of such issues as the nature of mind and the hard problem of consciousness, a philosophical problem named by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers.

Searle is notable for his Chinese Room argument against strong AI. Nagel is notable for his anti-physicalist views in What is it like to be a bat? Dennett coined terms like intuition pump. The Churchlands argue for eliminative materialism.

In the early 21st century, embodied cognition has gained strength as a theory of mind–body–world integration. Philosophers such as Shaun Gallagher and Alva Noë, together, defend this view and see it as a natural development of pragmatism and of the thinking of Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty among others.

Philosophy of language

In addition, other American scholars made important contributions to the study of the philosophy of language. Donald Davidson is also a philosopher of language perhaps best known for his thought experiment of Swampman. Keith Donnellan was another notable philosopher of language.

George Philip Lakoff and Mark L. Johnson presented insights in the field of cognitive linguistics by exploring the manner in which conceptual metaphors influence the process of understanding and the conveyance of "meaning" in general. Similarly, Colin Murray Turbayne raised awareness of the manner in which ancient dead metaphors continue to influence the evolution of modern scholarly analysis in the philosophy of science. Kendall Walton expounded upon conceptual metaphors even further by formulating a more generalized "make-believe" theory of representation within the field of anti-realist ontology and aesthetics.

Philosophy of science

The Stanford School is one group of philosophers, who argued against the unity of science. Tim Maudlin does the philosophy of physics. Dennett argues for Darwin's views on natural selection, while Jerry Fodor argues against them.

Christian philosophy

Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga is an analytic philosopher known for revitalizing interest in Christian philosophy and reformed epistemology with his free will defense to the logical problem of evil, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, the position that belief in the existence of God is properly basic, and his modal version of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Michael C. Rea has developed Plantinga's thought by claiming that both naturalism and supernaturalism are research programmes that have to be adopted as a basis for research.

American Christian philosophy includes Peter van Inwagen, William Lane Craig, William Alston, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Van Inwagen is notable for doubting the principle of sufficient reason. Van Inwagen also believes in free will and is known for the consequence argument, introducing the term incompatibilism about free will and determinism, to stand in contrast to compatibilism—the view that free will is compatible with determinism. William Lane Craig defends the Kalam cosmological argument.

J. C. Beall advocates logical pluralism and Christianity.

Pittsburgh school

Several mid-20th century American scholars renewed the study of idealism to emphasize the role of mind in nature, often with insights from analytic philosophy. Influenced by Sellars, the American philosopher Nicholas Rescher includes himself and his University of Pittsburgh colleagues John McDowell and Robert Brandom within a group of post-Hegelian "neo-idealists" known as the Pittsburgh School. In his Mind and World (1994), McDowell embraced an intricate form of "mitigated naturalism" derived from Kant's distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, while also circumventing the two extremes of "rampant Platonism" and "bald naturalism".

Law

Martha Nussbaum known for her work in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of emotions.

Noted American legal philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner work in the fields of political philosophy and jurisprudence. Posner is famous for his economic analysis of law, a theory which uses microeconomics to understand legal rules and institutions. Dworkin is famous for his theory of law as integrity and legal interpretivism, especially as presented in his book Law's Empire.

Wisdom

A renewed interest in the use of the ancient concept of philosophical wisdom to resolve contemporary problems in the realms of both ethics and metaphysics also emerged during this century among several philosophers in America. By pointing toward the significant role played by the virtues of compassion, empathy and understanding in the philosophical teachings of ancient Greece, these scholars argued that while the utilization of rational thought may in practice be necessary to formulate such solutions, it is also, by its very nature, not sufficient when utilized by itself. Included in this group are Martha Nussbaum and Richard Clyde Taylor.

See also

• History of philosophy

Lists

• List of Jewish American philosophers

Organizations

• American Philosophical Association
• American Philosophical Society
• American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy

References

• Ayer, A. J., ed. (1959). "Editor's introduction". Logical Positivism. Free Press. pp. 3–30.
• Gettier, Edmund L. (1963). "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?". Analysis. 23 (6): 121–123. doi:10.1093/analys/23.6.121.
• Plato (1992). Burnyeat, Myles (ed.). Theaetetus. Hackett.
• Searle, John (2003). "Contemporary Philosophy in the United States". In Bunnin, N.; Tsui-James, E. P (eds.). The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Blackwell.
• Soames, Scott (2003). Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1, The Dawn of Analysis. Princeton University Press.

External links

• American philosophy at PhilPapers
• Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "American philosophy". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.
• American Philosophical Association
• American Philosophical Society
• Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy