A History of Philosophy in America

Abstract

Abstract I have been selective in my emphases rather than encyclopaedic and exhaustive. In focusing on American philosophy, the book makes implicit claims about thought and life related to a peculiar western polity and the US, by the nineteenth century. The study of the history of philosophy finally requires complex judgements of quality, which are both questionable and necessary. I have depicted student–teacher relations, conventions of argument, and constellations of problems that endure over generations; and the cultural setting and institutional connections that make up an enterprise of philosophy. I have described traditions of thought and the intentions of thinkers within a social matrix. The book divides naturally into three substantive parts: the first covers the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, and focuses on religious disputation; the second, from 1865–1930 on pragmatism, an influential American contribution to western ideas; the third, from 1910–2000, on professional philosophy in America, more secular and institutionalized. The thinkers covered include Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, C.I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty. The most important theme of the book is the long circuitous march from a religious to a secular vision of the universe. A subsidiary theme concerns social and political philosophy, the crux of Ch. 2.

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