Abstract

This dissertation investigates what is American about American pragmatism. Recognizing that Charles Sanders Peirce and William James drew their intellectual questions from European discourses, especially European psychology, the project interrogates what is distinctly 'American' about the only philosophical movement indigenous to this country. The dissertation argues that pragmatism's Americanness lies in the specific ways in which it altered European concepts and dispositions according to a residually 'Puritan' past. ;The pragmatists addressed questions concerning the nature of 'science' and the nature of 'the human,' questions which encapsulate broader cultural debates about the proper role and method of science and the possibility of scientifically studying 'the human.' Since these debates coalesce in Europe in efforts to articulate a scientific psychology, the dissertation focuses on the American reception and repositioning of European psychology. Delineating the intellectual spaces of German and Scottish psychology prepares the way for its repositioning by Peirce and James within theories of human knowing and being that emphasize the disciplined and purposive production of the self through habits or the will . Such repositioning is the constitutive mark of American pragmatism. ;The dissertation offers detailed readings of Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, William Hamilton, and Alexander Bain. Closely examining the concepts of consciousness, causality, will, action and belief shared by these four thinkers and drawing methodologically from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's metaphor of striated and smooth spaces, the dissertation constructs the striated spaces of German and Scottish psychology. It then indicates how conceptual lines of flight from those European spaces enable the production of the striated space of American pragmatism. The project examines how Peirce and James mutate the European concepts and argues that the smooth spaces or conditions of possibility of that transmutation can be articulated through the cultural legacy of American Puritanism. ;Deploying 'Puritanism' as a smooth space points to its fluid or deterritorialized character. The dissertation uses the persistence of 'Puritanism' in American rhetoric to capture the pragmatists' investments in constructing notions of subjectivity that balance 'matters of the heart' with matters of the mind