American Philosophy

The term "American Philosophy," perhaps surprisingly, has been
somewhat vague. While it has tended to primarily include philosophical
work done by Americans within the geographical confines of the United
States, this has not been exclusively the case. For example, Alfred
North Whitehead came to the United States relatively late in life. On
the other hand, George Santayana spent much of his life outside of the
United States. Until only recently, the term was used to refer to
philosophers of European descent. Another focus for defining, or at
least characterizing, American Philosophy has been on the types of
philosophical concerns and problems addressed. While American
philosophers have worked on traditional areas of philosophy, such as
metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology, this is not unique to
American Philosophy. Many scholars have highlighted American
philosophers' focus on the interconnections of theory and practice, on
experience and community, though these, too, are not unique to
American Philosophy. The people, movements, schools of thought and
philosophical traditions that have constituted American Philosophy
have been varied and often at odds with each other. Different concerns
and themes have waxed or waned at different times. For instance, the
analysis of language was important throughout much of the twentieth
century, but of very little concern before then, while the relation
between philosophy and religion, of great significance early in
American Philosophy, paled in importance during much of the twentieth
century. Despite having no core of defining features, American
Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and shaping
collective American identity over the history of the nation.

1. 17th Century

Though many people, communities and nations populated the area that is
now the United States long before the U.S.A. became a nation-state,
and they all wrestled with universal philosophical questions such as
the nature of the self, the relationships between persons, their
origins and destiny, most histories of American Philosophy begin with
European colonization, especially from the time of the Puritans in New
England. From the "Mayflower Compact," penned in 1620 as the early
English settlers arrived in the New World, basic socio-political
positions were made explicit and fundamental to newly established
communities. Speaking of forming a covenant to "combine ourselves into
a civil Body Politic," those arriving on the Mayflower immediately
identified a close and ineliminable connection between individuals and
their community. This sentiment was echoed in founding documents of
other colonies, such as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639)
and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641). Likewise, the writings
of prominent early colonial leaders, such as John Winthrop (1588-1649)
emphasized "the care of the public must oversway all private
respects…for it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist
in the ruin of the public." Although highly influential, such views
were not universal, as the Maryland Toleration Act (1649) and the
writings of other influential leaders, e.g., Roger Williams
(1603-1683) stressed religious tolerance over commitment to the
religious covenant of a community. From the earliest concerns, then,
even prior to the establishment of the United States, the social and
political issues of the relation of individuals to their communities
as well as the nature of the communities themselves (that is, as
secular or religious) were paramount.
2. 18th Century

Broadly speaking, American Philosophy in the eighteenth century can be
divided into two halves, the first still heavily influenced by the
Calvinism of the Puritans and the second more directly along the lines
of the European Enlightenment and associated with the political
philosophy of the Founding Fathers (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin).

Far and away the most significant thinker of the first half of the
18th century for American Philosophy was Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758).
Often associated primarily with the fiery oratory of sermons such as
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and the religious revivalist
"Great Awakening" of the 1740s, Edwards both distilled and assimilated
Calvinist theological thought and the emergent Newtonian scientific
worldview. Frequently characterized as trying to synthesize a
Christian Platonism, with an emphasis on the reality of a spiritual
world, with an empiricist epistemology, an emphasis on Lockean
sensation and Newtonian corpuscular physics, Edwards drew directly
from the thought of Bishop George Berkeley, who stressed the necessity
of mind (or non-material reality) to make sense of human experience.
This non-material mind, for Edwards, consists of understanding and
will, both of which are passive at root. It is understanding that,
along lines of the successes of Newtonian physics, leads to the
fundamental metaphysical category of Resistance, which Edwards
characterizes as "the primary quality of objects." That is, whatever
features objects might have, what is fundamental to something qua
object is that is resists. This power of resistance is "the actual
exertion of God's power" and is demonstrated by Newton's basic laws of
motion, in which objects at rest or in motion will remain undeterred
until and unless acted on by some other force (that is, resisted).
Understanding, though, is different than will. Edwards is perhaps best
known for his rejection of free will. As he remarked, "we can do as we
please, but we cannot please as we please." Just as there is natural
necessity and natural inability, for Edwards, there is moral necessity
and moral inability. Every act of will is connected to understanding,
and thus determined. Echoing the views of John Calvin, Edwards saw not
(good) works, but the grace of God as the determiner of human fortune.

While couched primarily in a religious context for Edwards but less so
for others, the acceptance and adaptation of a Newtonian worldview was
something shared by most American philosophers in the latter half of
the 18th century. These later thinkers, however, abandoned to a great
extent the religious context and focused rather on social-political
issues. Sharing many commitments of European philosophers of the Age
of Enlightenment (such as a reliance on reason and science, a broad
faith in scientific and social progress along with a belief in the
perfectibility of humans, a strong advocacy of political democracy and
laissez-faire economics), many of the famous names of American history
identified themselves with this enlightenment thought. While they
attended very little to basic issues of metaphysics or epistemology,
the Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Benjamin
Franklin (1706-1790), and James Madison (1751-1836), wrote
voluminously on social and political philosophy. The American
Declaration of Independence as well as the United States Constitution,
with its initial amendments, better known as the Bill of Rights, was
drafted at this time, with their emphasis on religious toleration.
Though including explicit references to God, these thinkers tended to
commit themselves in their writings less to Christianity per se and
more to deism, the view of God as creator of a world governed by
natural laws (which they believed were explicated for the most part by
Newton) but not directly involved with human action. For example, as
early as 1730 and as late as 1790 Franklin spoke of God as
world-creator and Jesus as providing a system of morality but with no
direct commitment to the divinity of Jesus or to any organized church.
Instead, a major focus of concern was the appropriate nature of the
State and its relation to individuals. While the thought of Thomas
Jefferson, exemplified in the language of the Declaration of
Independence, emphasized natural, inalienable rights of individuals
against the tyranny of the State – with the legitimacy of the State
only in securing the rights of individuals – federalists such as James
Madison highlighted dangers of factional democracy, with his view of
protecting both individual rights and the public good.
3. 19th Century

In a letter to John Adams written in 1814, Thomas Jefferson complained
that, while the post-revolutionary American youth lived in happier
times than their parents, this younger generation held "all knowledge
which is not innate, [to be] in contempt, or neglect at least." Their
"folly" included endorsing "self-learning and self-sufficiency; of
rejecting the knowledge acquired in past ages, and starting on the new
ground of intuition." These complaints reflected Jefferson's concerns
about the rise of romanticism in early nineteenth century America.
Transcendentalism, or American Romanticism, was the first of several
major traditions to characterize philosophical thought in America's
first full century as a nation, with Transcendentalism succeeded by
the impact of Darwinian evolutionary thought and finally developing
into America's most renowned school of thought, Pragmatism. A Hegelian
movement, centered in St. Louis and identified largely with its chief
proponent, George Holmes Howison (1834-1916), occurred in the second
half of the nineteenth century, but was overshadowed by the rise of
Pragmatism. Even the journal founded in 1867 by the St. Louis
Hegelians, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, became best known
later on because of its publication of essays by the pragmatist
Charles Peirce (1839-1914).

Where the thinkers of the American enlightenment stressed social and
political concerns, based on a Newtonian mechanistic view of the
world, the thinkers of American Transcendentalism took the emphasis on
individuals and their relation to the community in a different
direction. This direction was based not on a mechanistic view of the
world, but on an organic metaphor that stressed the subjective nature
of human experience and existence. Highlighting personal experience
and often even a fairly mystical holism, writers such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1872), and Walt Whitman
(1819-1892) argued for the priority of personal non-cognitive,
emotional connections to nature and to the world as a whole. Human are
agents in the world more fundamentally than they are knowers of the
world. "Real" knowledge is intuitive and personal; it transcends
scientific understanding that is based on empirical sense experience.
Because of this, those things that constrain or restrict free personal
thought, such as conventional morality and political institutions,
need to be transcended as well. This spirit is captured in the poetry
of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in which he claims, "I celebrate
myself…Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves
from their jambs! I speak the past-word primeval, I give the sign of
democracy…." This sentiment is echoed in the works of Emerson and
Thoreau, both of whom argue for the importance of self-reliance,
intuition, and a return to nature, i.e., an embracing of what is
non-civilized and non-industrial. In his 1836 paper, "Nature," Emerson
states, "In the woods, we return to reason and faith…I am nothing; I
see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I
am part or parcel of God…In the wilderness I find something more dear
and connate than in streets and villages." Emerson's "The
Transcendentalist" (1842) stands as a manifesto of this philosophical
movement, in which he explicitly identifies Transcendentalism as a
form of philosophical Idealism. Emerson wrote:

As thinkers, mankind have ever been divided into two sects,
Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience,
the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from
the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are
not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but
what are the things themselves, they cannot tell…Society is good when
it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.
Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the
self-existence of Deity…[Kant showed] there was a very important class
of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by way of experience,
but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions
of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms.

At the same time, during the 1830s and 1840s, there were other
thinkers who stressed greater social and political equality,
particularly several important women writers and activists, such as
Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902). The
call for social and political emancipation, in many ways a call to
fulfill the promise of the American enlightenment, came not just from
women such as Grimké and Stanton, but also from those demanding the
abolition of slavery, notably William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) and
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895).

Just as much of American philosophical thought was influenced by the
success of Newton's scientific worldview throughout the eighteenth
century, the publication of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in
1859 had a great impact on subsequent American philosophy. Though not
known widely outside of academic circles, two thinkers in particular
wrote passionately for re-conceiving philosophical concerns and
positions along Darwinian lines, John Fiske (1842-1901) and Chauncey
Wright (1830-1875). Both stressed the need to understand consciousness
and morality in terms of their evolutionary development. Such a
naturalistic, evolutionary approach became even more pronounced at the
end of the twentieth century. It was outside of academia, however,
often under the label of "Social Darwinism" that this view had even
greater impact and influence, especially via the writings of Herbert
Spencer (1820-1903) and William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). Both
Spencer and Sumner likened societies to organisms, in a struggle for
survival. Indeed, it was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term
"survival of the fittest" to capture what he (and many others) took to
be the significance of evolutionary theory. If groups within a
society, and even societies themselves, are – like biological
organisms – in a constant competition for survival, then a sign of
their fitness is the fact that the do in fact survive, for Spencer.
Such competition, indeed, is useful and good, for in the long run
those that survive will have competed and won, a clear statement of
their superiority. Spencer, Sumner and others, such as the
industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), argued that the social
implication of the fact of such struggle for survival is that
free-market capitalism is the natural economic system and the one that
will ensure the greatest success for a society's economic well-being.
In Sumner's essay, "The Man of Virtue," he remarks that, "Every man
and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or
her own self…Society, therefore, does not need any care or
supervision." Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth" echoes this view:
"[The law of competition] is here, we cannot evade it; no substitutes
for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for
the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the
survival of the fittest in every department…the law of competition
[is] not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the
race." The emphasis on competition as the key to evolutionary thought
was not shared by everyone, however. One prominent advocate of Darwin,
who nevertheless argued that cooperation rather than competition was
the message of evolutionary thought, was Lester Ward (1841-1913). Not
only are those groups that cooperate and function together as a group
more likely to survive than those that don't, he claimed, but human
history has shown that government is a natural, emergent feature of
human societies, rather than, contra Sumner, a hindrance and
impediment to progress.

After Transcendentalism and evolutionary philosophy, the third and by
far most renowned philosophical movement in nineteenth century America
was Pragmatism. Informally christened as "pragmatism" in the 1870s by
one of its most famous proponents, Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism
is seen by most philosophers today as the classic American
philosophical tradition. Not easily definable, Pragmatism is a
constellation of principles, stances, and philosophical commitments,
some of which are more or less salient for particular pragmatism
philosophers (as will be noted below). Nevertheless, there are threads
that run across and through most pragmatists. There is a strong
naturalistic bent, meaning that they look for an understanding of
phenomena and concepts in terms of how they arose and how they play a
part in our engagement with the world. Peirce's "pragmatic maxim"
captures this stance as follows: "Consider what effects, which 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." There is a rejection of a
foundationalist view of knowledge. All knowledge claims are fallible
and revisable. The flip side of such fallibility and revisibility is
that no inquiry is disinterested. Beliefs are fundamentally
instruments for us to cope with the contingencies of the world. In
addition, there is an enunciated commitment to intersubjectivity and
community. So, while rejecting the notion of any pure "givens," of
experience, pragmatists also reject any pure subjectivism or
abandonment of standards or criteria of adjudication beyond the
individual. Unlike the American philosophical movements that preceded
Pragmatism, pragmatists wrestled with issues and concerns across the
philosophical spectrum, from basic metaphysics to epistemology to all
forms of axiology (ethical, political, and even aesthetic).
a. Charles Peirce

Generally acknowledged as the "Big Three" classical pragmatists are
Charles Peirce, William James (1842-1910), and John Dewey (1859-1952).
Peirce, a polymath by all accounts, not only coined the term
"pragmatism" in the 1870s, but did ground-breaking work in semiotics
(the study of signs) as well as in logic, particularly in the logic of
relations. In addition, while a scientist and mathematician by trade,
he wrote a considerable amount on the philosophy of science (for
example, on the nature of explanation), value theory, and metaphysics,
including seminal work on categories. From his early writings in the
1860s, in which he criticized Cartesian doubt and foundationalist
search for indubitability, to his later works on cognition and what he
termed "evolutionary cosmology," Peirce continuously and consistently
argued against forms of nominalism and in favor of realism, both in
the sense that non-particulars are real (though perhaps not existent)
and in the sense that our conceptions are of things independent of us.
An important feature of Peirce's pragmatism is a strident rejection of
subjectivism. This comes through in his insistence that, as inquirers
do not exist in isolation, beliefs are not fulfilled (as he put it,
the irritation of doubt is not overcome) in isolation. Rather, it is
the development of successful habit that matters and it is the verdict
of the community of inquirers in the long run that matters in the
determination of what settles inquiry. Just as this is not a
subjectivist view of what is real or true, it is also not a "social
constructivist" view, in which what is real or true is determined by
what society decides. Instead, as in the model of good science, there
is a community of inquirers who form a system of checks and balances
for any belief, but this community of inquirers operates within a
world of objects, qualities, relations, and laws.

In establishing his notion of pragmatism as a means of clarifying and
determining the meaning of signs, Peirce coined his "Pragmatic Maxim,"
noted above. This maxim not only points to pragmatism as a criterion
of meaningfulness but also to pragmatism as a standard of truth. For
Peirce, belief is not merely a cognitive state of an isolated agent,
rather it encompasses an awareness of a state of affairs along with
the appeasement of the irritation of doubt (or surprise) and – as
genuine belief and not simply verbiage – the establishment of a habit,
or rule of action. This requirement of a rule of action carries over
for Peirce beyond epistemological concerns to metaphysical ones as
well, particularly in his work on categories, or fundamental modes of
being. Using varied terminology at different times, Peirce identified
three fundamental categories of being. One category was that of
Quality (or Firstness). This is the conception of being independent of
anything else, such as the example of a pure tone or color. A second
category was that of Brute Fact (or Secondness), that is being
relative to or connected with something else. This might be a
particular instance of a tone or a color sample. This is what he
sometimes called the "demonstrative application" of a sign. Finally,
there is Law, or Habit (or Thirdness), or mediation whereby a First
and Second are brought into relation. This is the notion of regularity
and representation, and as such involves a regulative as well as
descriptive aspect. An example is a red light indicating the need to
stop or perhaps indicating danger. Law, habit, regularity are neither
reducible to the particular instances that are true of it (that is,
Secondness) nor to the pure material quality of what is instantiated
in those particulars (that is, Firstness). For Peirce, these three
categories are all real, are all irreducible to the others, and are
all involved in any form or act of inquiry. In particular, his
insistence on the reality of Habit/Law was basic, as was noted above,
to his advocacy of a pragmatist conception of inquiry.
b. William James

William James, known during his lifetime as much for his work in
psychology as for his work in philosophy, did much more than Peirce to
popularize the label and notion of pragmatism, both as a philosophical
method for resolving disputes and as a theory of meaning and truth.
Though James himself also argued against subjectivism and for the
importance of "older truths" (that is, established facts), his
writings led many others (including Peirce) to see his position as
much more relativist and nominalist-leaning. James stressed the
practical effects of belief and assertion, claiming that truth is a
species of good (what it is ultimately good for us to believe). Much
of James's philosophical work was aimed at dissolving many of the
traditional philosophical puzzles and conundrums by showing that they
made no practical difference in our lives or that they rested on
mistaken and fruitless assumptions. For example, the traditional
metaphysical concern of the nature of substance, as a category of
things underlying and separable from attributes, has led to
philosophers since the time of Plato to argue back and forth without
any apparent solution. For James, the only significance of such an
issue is what effect on our subsequent experience is likely to occur
given the adoption of some position with respect to this issue.
Likewise, any stance on, say, the existence of God, will matter only
if adopting a belief (for or against such existence) will shape our
future experience for the better. Since beliefs are instruments for
coping with the world, those beliefs that are good for us, those that
indeed help us cope, are the ones that are true. Of course, the
goodness and coping-value of some beliefs might be negligible as in my
beliefs that Romans wore socks while in Britain. The point for James
is not the level or strength of goodness, but the appropriate
criterion of truth and significance. While James, then, often focused
on trying to dissolve long-standing philosophical puzzles, he also
offered substantive positions on many issues. He argued for what is
now called a compatibalist view of free will (that human freedom is
compatible with some forms of determinism) as well as against a
dualist view of mind. With respect to some traditional philosophical
issues, e.g., freedom vs. determinism, he advocated a particular
position because he did see predictable good or bad consequences. With
respect to determinism, for example, he argued that a belief in
determinism leads to a feeling of fatalism and a capitulation to the
status quo; hence, it is not better for us.

In metaphysics, he is still known for his view of "radical
empiricism," in which he argued that relations between objects are as
real as the properties of objects. This view, he claimed, consisted in
outline of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized
conclusion. The postulate is that the only things that shall be
debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn
from experience. The statement of fact is that the relations between
things are just as much matters of direct particular experience as the
things themselves or their properties. For example, when one looks at
a cat and a mouse, not only are those two objects (and their
properties, such as their color and shape) immediate aspects of my
visual experience, but so is the relation of their relative sizes;
that is, it is also an aspect of my immediate visual experience that I
see that the cat is larger than the mouse. Seeing the cat as being
larger than the mouse is just as immediate as seeing that the cat is
black and the mouse is gray. The generalized conclusion is that the
parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that
are themselves parts of experience. As James puts it, the "directly
apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical
connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or
continuous structure."

Another metaphysical commitment of James is that of pluralism, i.e.,
that there is no single correct description or account of the world.
With his consequentialist, future-oriented pragmatist view, focusing
on effective possibilities, James argued that there can be multiple
warranted or "true" accounts. Not only can there be different good
accounts, but different correct accounts. In holding this view, James
rejects a straight correspondence view of truth (what he calls "the
copy theory") in which truth is simply a relation between a belief and
a state of affairs. Rather, truth involves both a belief and facts
about the world, but also other background beliefs and, indeed, future
consequences. For James, then, the very distinction between a good
account and a correct account is not a sharp dichotomy. This does not
mean that any account is as good as any other; clearly that is false.
Rather, there can be different accounts that not only make sense of
present and past knowledge and experience, but lead to useful future
experiences. What will determine the truth or warrantability of an
account will be its consequences (e.g., are predictions based on it
borne out in experience, does it promote physical and spiritual
flourishing, does it survive intersubjective scrutiny?).
c. John Dewey

Born a generation after Peirce and James, and living decades past them
both, John Dewey produced a body of work that reached a far greater
audience than either of his predecessors. Like Peirce and James, Dewey
engaged in academic philosophical writing, publishing many essays and
books on metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Unlike Peirce
and James, though, he also wrote a vast amount on social and political
philosophy and very often engaged in dialogue outside of the academy.
He became nationally known as an education reformer, frequently
participating in public forums, and producing highly influential works
such as Democracy and Education. His social and political writings,
such as The Public and Its Problems, reached an audience far beyond
academic philosophers. Within philosophy proper, Dewey is probably
best known for his work on inquiry and logic. Stating that all inquiry
is conducted by agents, and not merely by passive information
processors, he emphasized the experimental and instrumental nature of
human conduct. Taking inquiry to be "the controlled transformation of
an indeterminate situation so as to convert the elements of the
original situation into a unified whole," Dewey argued that logic,
formal rules of inference and implication, are ultimately
generalizations of warranted, or warrantable, conclusions. Logic is a
species of inquiry, and the latter is never disinterested or free of
valuation. This emphasis on purposeful interaction between agents and
environments points to Dewey's well-known criticism of what he termed
"the quest for certainty." Too much human activity (with philosophers
being primary culprits) has been a search for absolutes, whether in
the area of ontology, epistemology, or ethics. This, for Dewey, is
mistaken. The world is filled with contingencies and is in flux. Human
inquiry should be a matter of purposeful action in response to, and
ultimately in anticipation of, such contingencies and change.
Intelligence is experimental and evaluative; we learn by doing, by
engagement with the puzzles and problems presented by a changing
environment. While there might not be eternal, absolute standards or
criteria for, say, moral judgment, it is also the case that there are
criteria that transcend subjective preferences, since there are facts
about the contingencies and problems we face.

Constantly and consistently stressing a naturalistic account of human
activity, Dewey (like James) saw human inquiry as the entertainment of
hypotheses and intelligence as evaluative. Preferring to call his
philosophical approaches "instrumentalist" rather than "pragmatist,"
Dewey emphasized the contingent, purposive nature of human action.
This "learning-by-doing" view carried over into his metaphysical
commitments. For example, he frequently stressed the position that an
agent can only be fully understood as one pole in a person-environment
interaction, not merely as a subject bumping into a world of objects.
This carried over into more immediately practical areas, such as his
educational theory. Here he strongly advocated formal schooling as a
means to enhance the autonomy of persons, whereby that autonomy is
understood as the ability of persons to frame purposes, plans and life
goals along with the skills and abilities to carry those purposes and
plans and goals into effect. An education that is relevant to
meaningful experiences is one that recognizes and is based on two
principles: a principle of continuity (we are temporal agents and
today's experiences are part of a continuum with yesterday's and
tomorrow's) as well as a principle of interaction (we are social
beings and one's experiences are inherently and ineliminably
interwoven with the experiences of others).

Frequently critiquing and rejecting dichotomies that he saw as
unfounded and unsustainable, Dewey argued often against a fact/value
dichotomy. What is good (or bad) is relative to contexts and goals,
but at the same time is a matter of what helps an organism cope with
and flourish in the world. Drawing from a Darwinian heritage and
writing as an early proponent of what is now seen as evolutionary and
naturalistic ethics, Dewey growth is the only moral end. Adaptation
and adjustment to different and changing environments, including
social and moral environments, are the signs of appropriate action. In
the interaction with one's environments, an agent must decide among
goals and choices of action, based on predicted outcomes. Appraising
situations and deliberating on likely outcomes is what Dewey refers to
as "valuation." This process of valuation, for Dewey, clearly
demonstrates the useless and mistaken notion of a fact/value
dichotomy.

Finally, along with arguing for valuation at the level of the
individual organism or person, Dewey wrote voluminously on valuation
at the level of the group or community. Often speaking of democracy as
a way of life, he claimed that full self-realization requires
community and emphasized this self-realization in the context of
individuals' participation in social collectives. Social arrangements,
in fact, are means of "creating" individuals, for Dewey, not
oppressive or repressive impositions on them (at least, not by their
nature; social arrangements could be oppressive and repressive, but
not merely by being social). Social arrangements, far from being
foreign impositions on our freedom, are both "natural" and can be
enhancing of our individual freedom. Dewey fleshes out this claim by
distinguishing two types of freedom: freedom of movement and freedom
of intelligence. Freedom of movement is what some philosophers refer
to by the expression "freedom from." To be free in this sense means
that one is free from external constraints on one's movements. This,
says Dewey, is certainly an important sense of freedom, but it is only
a sense that is a means toward a more important end, which he
designates as a fuller sort of freedom, namely, freedom of
intelligence (or what some philosophers call "freedom to"). Simply
having no (significant) external constraints on one's movements does
not lead to or entail self-realization. As he put it in The Public and
Its Problems: "No man and no mind was ever emancipated merely by being
left alone." What one is free to do, what one does with that absence
of constraint is a much more important sense of freedom for Dewey. He
expresses this fuller sense of freedom is a variety of ways throughout
his writings, e.g., it is "a sound instinct which identifies freedom
with the power to frame purposes and to execute or carry into effect
purposes so framed." Freedom of movement (that is, freedom from
constraints) is a necessary, but on a necessary, condition for this
fuller sense of freedom. Furthermore, this freedom of intelligence
results not from living in isolation of in rejecting social
constraints (or, in his wording, "social controls"). In fact, social
controls are quite natural and self-directed, Dewey claims. For
example, he says, watch children at play. One of the first things they
will do is to establish rules and parameters for play, in order to
make play possible. Games involve rules, which constrain action, but
at the same time make meaningful action possible. The important point
here is that these rules are not only accepted, but most often
self-imposed by the children at play. In addition to being natural,
freedom of intelligence, which incorporates social controls, is social
in its nascence. For Dewey: "Liberty is that secure release and
fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich
and manifold association with others; the power to be an
individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in
its own way the fruits of association."
d. Other Pragmatists

Besides the "Big Three" classical pragmatists, there were many other
important thinkers labeled (sometimes self-identified) as pragmatist.
George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) was particularly influential during
the first several decades of the twentieth century, especially in his
work on the social development of the self and of language. A
generation later, Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1964) wrote several
significant works in the middle third of the twentieth century on what
he termed "conceptualistic pragmatism," stressing how pragmatic
grounds shape the interpretation of experience. His contemporary,
Alain Locke (1885-1954), blending the thought of earlier pragmatists
with that of W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), produced a large body of work
on the social construction of identity (particularly focusing on race)
and advocating cultural pluralism within the context of what he called
a philosophy of "critical relativism" or "critical pragmatism."

Another important thinker, often labeled as pragmatist, but noted more
for advocating an explicit version of philosophical idealism, was
Josiah Royce (1855-1916). Though there were other American idealists
(e.g., G. H. Howison of the St. Louis Hegelians and Bordon Parker
Bowne (1847-1910), known for his view of "personalism"), Royce is
recognized as the most influential of them. Epistemologically, Royce
noted that any analysis of experience shows that the fact and, indeed,
very possibility of error leads to the postulation of both mind and
external reality, since only minds can be in error and being in error
presupposes something about which mind can be mistaken. The
recognition of error presupposes a higher level of awareness, since
knowing that one is in error about X presupposes that one recognize
both X and what is mistaken about one's judgment. Error, then,
presupposes some form or level of veridicality. Much like the story of
the blind men who come upon an elephant, each believing that part of
the elephant captures the whole, the message here is that error is
really partiality, that is having only partial truth. For Royce, this
also pointed to the ultimate communal nature of all interpretation, as
knowledge (even of one's self) comes from signs, which in turn require
some kind of comparison and finally of community. Royce extended this
view, and displayed definite affinities to pragmatism, in his analysis
of meaning. The meaning of an idea, he claimed, contained both an
external and an internal element, much as we say that terms have both
a denotation and a connotation. Ideas have external meaning in the
sense that they connect up to an external world. But they have an
internal meaning in the sense that they embody or express purpose.
What is real, Royce claimed, is "the complete embodiment in individual
form and in final fulfillment, of the internal meaning of finite
ideas." As these in turn require comparison and moving beyond
partiality, they come finally to a complete and coherent absolute
level of ideas, what he termed "Absolute Pragmatism."
4. 20th Century and Recent

Much of the philosophical work of the classic pragmatists, as well as
that of Royce and others, though begun in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, carried over into the early decades of the
twentieth century. While pragmatism continued to be a dominant
movement in American philosophy in these early decades, other
movements and schools of thought emerged. In the first several
decades, there was a revival of common sense realism and naturalism
(or, put another way, an explicit rejection of what was seen as the
idealism of Royce and some aspects of pragmatism) as well as the
emergence of Process Philosophy, which was directly influenced by
contemporary science, especially Einsteinian relativity theory.
Mid-twentieth century philosophy was heavily dominated in America by
empiricism and analytic philosophy, with a strong focus on language.
Finally, in the latter couple of decades there was a re-discovery and
revival of pragmatism as well as the emergence of feminist and
"minority" issues and concerns, of people and groups who had been
marginalized and under-represented throughout the nation's history.
Some movements and schools of thought that had been prominent in
Europe, such as existentialism and phenomenology, though having
advocates in America, never gained significant widespread attention in
American philosophy.

One of the earliest movements in twentieth century American thought
was a rejection of idealism, spearheaded in large part by Royce's own
student, George Santayana (1863-1952), who saw philosophy as having
unfortunately abandoned, and in the case of idealism contradicted,
common sense. If we push the concept of knowledge to the point of
requiring indubitability, then skepticism is the result, since nothing
will satisfy this requirement. On the other hand, if knowledge is a
kind of faith, much as common sense rests on untested assumptions,
then we are led to a view of "animal faith," which Santayana endorses.
This return to common sense, or at least to a naturalist, realist
stance was echoed by many philosophers at this time. In 1910 an essay
in the Journal of Philosophy (then called the Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods), entitled, "The Program and First
Platform of Six Realists," announced a strong reaction against
idealism and what were seen idealist elements in pragmatism. Among the
platform planks of this program were statements that objects exist
independently of mind, that ontology is logically independent of
epistemology, that epistemology is not logically fundamental (that is,
that things are known directly to us), that the degree of unity,
consistency, or connection subsisting among entities is a matter to be
empirically ascertained, etc. Given this realist stance, these
philosophers then proceeded to try to produce naturalistic accounts of
philosophical matters, for example, Ralph Barton Perry's (1876-1957)
General Theory of Value.

A second school of thought early in the century was known as "Process
Philosophy." Identified largely with the work of Alfred North
Whitehead (1861-1947), though having other notable proponents such as
Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), process philosophy proceeded from an
ontology that took events or processes as primary. Change and becoming
were emphasized over permanence and being. Drawing on contemporary
scientific advances, in particular the new Einsteinian worldview,
Whitehead highlighted this "event ontology." In his well-known work,
The Concept of Nature, he insisted that "nature is a structure of
events," and taking the new Einsteinian four-dimensional understanding
of the world, things (what he called "concresences") are merely those
streams of events "which maintain permanence of character." This
embracing of contemporary science did not entail a materialist stance
for Whitehead any more than Jonathan Edwards's embracing of the
Newtonian worldview entailed materialism on his part. Rather,
Whitehead distinguished between the notion of "Nature lifeless" and
"Nature alive," with the latter an acknowledgement of value and
purpose being just as basic to experience as an external world of
events.

Despite the presence of these two movements and the still-present
influence of pragmatism, the middle half of the twentieth century was
dominated in America by empiricism and analytic philosophy, with a
pronounced turn toward linguistic analysis. Beginning with the
powerful influence of the Logical Positivists (or Logical
Empiricists), most notably Rudolf Carnap (1891-1969), academic
philosophy turned in a decided way away from social and political
concerns to conceptual analysis and self-reflection (that is, to the
question of just what the proper role of philosophy is). Without a
doubt, the most influential American philosopher during this time was
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). Though Quine was critical of many
aspects of Logical Positivism, indeed, one of his most renowned essays
was "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," he nevertheless shared their view that
the role of philosophy was not to enlighten persons or serve social
and political concerns. Saying that philosophers in the professional
sense have no particular fitness for inspiration or "helping to get
society on an even keel," he argued instead that philosophy's job is
to clear away conceptual muddles and mistakes. Seeing philosophy as in
large part continuous with science in the sense of trying to
understand what there is and how we can then flourish in the world, he
claimed that philosophy is on the abstract, theoretical end of
scientific pursuits. Advocating a physicalist ontology, Quine was
openly behaviorist about understanding human agency and knowledge.
Criticizing the analytic/synthetic distinction and the view that there
are truths independent of facts about the world, Quine strongly
advocated a naturalized epistemology and naturalized ethics. Openly
acknowledging an affinity with some aspects of pragmatism, Quine
claimed a holistic approach to knowledge, insisting that no particular
experiences occur in isolation; rather we experience a "web of
belief," with every belief or statement or experience affecting "the
field as a whole," and hence "our statements about the external world
face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a
corporate body." Reminiscent of Dewey, Quine asserted that while there
is no fact/value dichotomy, the sciences, with their system of checks
and balances, do provide the best theories and models of what there
is. Besides his commitment to materialism, behaviorism, and holism,
Quine urged what he called "semantic ascent," that is, that philosophy
should proceed by focusing on an analysis of language. By looking at
the language we use and by framing philosophical concerns in terms of
language, we can avoid fruitless philosophical disputes and faulty
ontological commitments. Within academic philosophy, Quine is perhaps
best known for his work in formal, mathematical logic and with his
doctrine of "the indeterminacy of translation." In his highly
influential book, Word and Object, he introduced the term "gavagai."
"Gavagai" is a term uttered by a native while pointing at something in
the immediate environment, something that appears to us as a rabbit.
However, from that utterance, we don't know if "gavagai" should be
translated into English as "rabbit" or "undetached rabbit parts" or
"rabbit time-slice" or something else. The point is that there is no
givenness to the situation, no determinateness of translation. Nor is
this a simple matter, as this lack of givenness and determinacy holds
in all situations. There are other, pragmatic, factors that allow
communication and understanding to be possible.

With this formal, often extremely technical, conceptual analysis
dominating mid-century American philosophy, a return to social and
political concerns did not become mainstream again until the 1970s.
Such a return is often credited to the publication of John Rawls's
(1921-2002) A Theory of Justice. While other philosophers had, of
course, written on these issues, it was Rawls's book that brought
these topics back into mainstream consideration among professional
philosophers. Rawls argued for a position of political liberalism
based on a system of procedural justice. Though his work was widely
influential, it was critiqued by philosophers identified as
libertarian, such as Robert Nozick (1938-2002), who saw it as too
restrictive of individual liberties, as well as by communitarians,
such as Alasdair MacIntyre (1929- ) who saw it as focusing too much on
procedural justice and not enough on what is good for persons, who are
also citizens situated in communities. Still, the revival of
substantive social and political philosophy was effected. Outside of
academic philosophy, these concerns had not been absent, however, but
were present in the writings of social and political leaders, and in
popular political philosophy, such as the writings of Ayn Rand
(1905-1982) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

As the century ended, there was a renewal of interest in pragmatism as
a philosophical movement, with two important philosophers in
particular adopting the label of pragmatist, Hilary Putnam (1926- )
and Richard Rorty (1931- ). Known throughout the philosophical world,
they brought the writings and stance of classical pragmatists back
into the forefront of professional philosophy, often with their
critiques of each other's works. This renewal of pragmatism, along
with the revival of social and political philosophy, came at the same
time, the final quarter of the century, as feminist philosophy
emerged, though there had been prominent feminist thinkers in American
philosophy prior to this time, e.g., Grimké and Stanton, noted
earlier, as well as others, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935) or even Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643). Outside of academic
philosophy, the publication, in the 1960s, of Betty Friedan's The
Feminine Mystique, struck a popular nerve about the marginalization of
women. Inside academic philosophy, feminist philosophers, such as
Adrienne Rich (1929- ) and many others, began critiques of traditional
philosophical concerns and stances. These critiques were leveled at
the very roots of philosophical issues and across the board. For
example, there were critiques of epistemic values such as objectivity
(that is, detached, disembodied inquiry), as well as what were taken
as masculine approaches to ethics and political philosophy, such as
procedural over substantive justice or rights-based ethical theories.
Insisting that there was not a public/private dichotomy and no
value-neutral inquiry, feminists reformulated philosophical issues and
concerns and redirected philosophical attention to issues of power and
the social dimensions (and construction) of those very issues and
concerns. This demand for pluralism in content was expanded to
philosophical methods and goals, generally, and was expanded to other
traditionally marginalized perspectives. By century's end, traditional
philosophical work continued in full force, for example, with a strong
surge of interest in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, etc.,
but was accompanied at the same time by a sharp increase in these
newly-demanded foci, such as philosophy of race, philosophy of law,
philosophy of power, etc.

One final note. This survey of American Philosophy clearly is
all-too-brief. One difficulty with summarizing American Philosophy is
what has counted as philosophy over time. Unlike European cultures,
there has tended to be less of an academic class in America, hence
less of a sense of professional philosophy, until, that is, the
twentieth century. Even then, much of what has been taken as
philosophy by most Americans has been distant from what most
professional philosophers have taken as philosophy. The kind of public
awareness in France and indeed Europe as a whole of, say, the death of
Jean-Paul Sartre, was nowhere near matched in America by the death of
Quine, though for professional philosophers the latter was at least of
equal stature. Few American philosophers have had the social impact
outside of academia as John Dewey. A second difficulty here is that
many thinkers in American intellectual history lie outside what is
today considered philosophy. Because of his intellectual lineage,
Jonathan Edwards is still studied within American Philosophy, but
other important American thinkers, such as Reinhold Niebuhr
(1892-1971) and C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) are not. Much as other
academic disciplines, philosophy in America has become
professionalized. Nevertheless, professional philosophers, for example
in their analysis of rights and the question of the meaningfulness of
animal rights, or in their application of philosophical ethics to
health care contexts, have both reflected and shaped the face of
American culture.
5. References and Further Reading

There are numerous works available on particular American philosophers
and specific movements or philosophical traditions in American
philosophy. The references below are for books that deal widely with
American Philosophy as a whole.

* Blau, Joseph L. Men and Movements in American Philosophy.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952.
* Borradori, Giovanna. The American Philosopher. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
* Cohen, Morris. American Thought. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1954.
* Fisch, Max H. (ed.). Classic American Philosophers. New York:
Appelton-Century-Crofts, 1951.
* Flower, Elizabeth and Murray G. Murphy. A History of Philosophy
in American, two volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977.
* Hollinger, David A. and Charles Capper. The American
Intellectual Tradition, two volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989. (Second edition, 1993.)
* Harris, Leonard. Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of
African American Philosophy from 1917. Dubuque, IO: Kendell/Hunt,
1983.
* Harris, Leonard, Scott L. Pratt, and Anne S. Waters (eds.).
American Philosophies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
* Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in American, 1720-2000.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
* Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1860-1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
* MacKinnon, Barbara (ed.). American Philosophy: A Historical
Anthology. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985.
* Muelder, Walter G., Laurence Sears and Anne V. Schlabach (eds.).
The Develolpment of American Philosophy. New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1940. (Second edition, 1960.)
* Myers, Gerald (ed.). The Spirit of American Philosophy. New
York: Capricorn Books, 1971.
* Pratt, Scott L. Native Pragmatism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002.
* Reck, Andrew J. The New American Philosophers. New York: Dell, 1968.
* Reck, Andrew J. Recent American Philosophy. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1964.
* Schneider, Herbert W. A History of American Philosophy. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1946.
* Singer, Marcus G. (ed.) American Philosophy. Cambridge: Royal
Institute of Philosophy, 1985.
* Smith, John E. The Spirit of American Philosophy. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1963.
* Smith, John E. Themes in American Philosophy. New York: Harper &
Row, 1970.
* Stanlick, Nancy A. and Bruce S. Silver (eds.). Philosophy in
America: Primary Readings. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice
Hall, 2004.
* Stroh, Guy W. American Philosophy. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1968.
* Stuhr, John J. (ed.). Classical American Philosophy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987.
* Stuhr, John J. (ed.). Pragmatism and Classical American
Philosophy, second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
* Waters, Anne S. American Indian Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
* West, Cornell. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
* White, Morton (ed.). Documents in the History of American
Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
* White, Morton. Science and Sentiment in America. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972.
* Winn, Ralph B. (ed.). American Philosophy. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1968.