The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the “social dimensions of scientific knowledge” is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of “democracy” are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy (...) of science tend to be molded by the actual regimes of science organization within which they are embedded. These theses are illustrated by consideration of three representative philosophers of science: John Dewey, Hans Reichenbach, and Philip Kitcher.Author Keywords: Social dimensions of science; Logical positivism; Democracy; Context of discovery/justification; Goals of science. (shrink)

This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant during the first three decades (...) of the century. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, however, the middle third of the century witnessed the rising influence in America of what would become known as “‘analytic philosophy’,” with its primary roots in Europe: in the Cambridge philosophical analysis of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein; logical empiricism and positivism on the continent; and linguistic analysis and ordinary- language philosophy at Oxford. This overview stresses the persistence of pragmatist themes throughout much of the century, while emphasizing the mid-century transformations that resulted from developments primarily in analytic philosophy. These combined influences resulted at the turn of the millennium in the flourishing, among other developments, of distinctively analytic styles of pragmatism and naturalism. (shrink)

This survey of American philosophy first presents the classical "Golden Age of American Philosophy" with selections from Peirce, James, Dewey, Santayana, Whitehead, and Mead. This first part also includes selections from the schools of new and critical realism with R. B. Perry, A. O. Lovejoy, R. W. Sellars among the representatives. Part Two is entitled "The Contemporary Philosophical Scene" and has selections from the works of C. I. Lewis, Carnap, C. L. Stevenson, Quine, M. Black, B. (...) Blanshard, Tillich, S. Hook, and E. Nagel. Anthologies rarely please everyone. Some may feel that Josiah Royce should have been included in the "Golden Age" section. There are two good features of this volume, however, that make it suitable as either a text for a seminar in American philosophy or as a research manual or both. Each philosopher or philosophical movement is adequately introduced by the editor, and each section is concluded with a rather complete bibliography.—J. J. R. (shrink)

This latest in attempts to collect statements from living American philosophers presents thoughts and interests of those writing in the "middle decades," the fifty years from 1920 to 1970. The editor has restricted himself to America’s senior philosophers asking each to reflect on "the things that matter most," or "to share the motifs in their work and to present concerns about their world". Although some influential elders are missing from this collection, an interesting variety of viewpoints and styles of (...) American philosophizing are represented. Especially interesting are the reflections of Brand Blanshard, Edwin Burtt, Herbert Feigl, Charles Hartshorne, Stephen Pepper, Roy Wood Sellars, and Herbert Spiegelberg. Blanshard traces his development from the influences upon him of Bradley, and describes his own rationalist ethics and humanist religion. Herbert Feigl in an even more autobiographical vein relates how he came under the important influence of Moritz Schlick and to be a member of the Vienna Circle. Also included in his article is a summary of his views on the issues of induction, scientific explanation, the mind-body problem, determinism, and some matters of practical philosophy. Pepper explains how he originated the idea of world hypotheses, and how he believes these hypotheses themselves originate and function, and Spiegelberg sketches an intriguing "ethics for fellows in the fate of existence." In his essay Hartshorne mixes comments on pragmatism, idealism, and the "linguistic turn," with explanations of his own "neoclassical metaphysics."—B.M. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophical debates in the United States "redefining pragmatism" has become the conventional way to flag significant philosophical contests and to launch large conceptual and programmatic changes. This book analyzes the contributions of such developments in light of the classic formulations of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey and the interaction between pragmatism and analytic philosophy. American pragmatism was revived quite unexpectedly in the 1970s by Richard Rorty's philosophical heterodoxy and his running dispute with Hilary Putnam, who, (...) like Rorty, is a professed Deweyan.Reinventing Pragmatism examines the force of the new pragmatisms, from the emergence of Rorty's and Putnam's basic disagreements of the 1970s until the turn of the century. Joseph Margolis considers the revival of a movement generally thought to have ended by the 1950s as both a surprise and a turn of great importance. The quarrel between Rorty and Putnam obliged American philosophers, and eventually Eurocentric philosophy as a whole, to reconsider the direction of American and European philosophy, for instance in terms of competing accounts of realism and naturalism. (shrink)

Latin America - its people, its politics, its economy - has burst upon the world scene with powerful images that have captured the curiosity of many English-speaking North Americans. The strategic importance of this vast region to the stability of the Wes.

Twenty-two leading Latin American philosophers are featured in this complete anthology on the human condition, values, and the search for identity. Bibliography.

An antipathy to absolutes has been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century philosophy: universality, necessity, objectivity and the like have figured prominently on its index of prohibitions. Ironically, this anti-absolutism itself represents an absolutism of sorts. And it is actually injurious to the interests of philosophizing where adequacy sometimes demands absoluteness. Certain philosophicallysignificant facts root in the non-negotiable necessities of things—the wickedness of inflicting needless pain, for one.

The author's purpose was to present to the American lawyer, vital clues to the points of view which have influenced Latin-American attorneys. Kunz, who was a teacher in private & international law, was among the first scholars in the United States to become interested in Latin-American philosophy of law.

The Unraveling of Scientism, a companion to Joseph Margolis's Reinventing Pragmatism, follows the thread of American analytic philosophy through the second half ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Naturalized Context of Moral Reasoning1Elizabeth BaetenAmerican philosophy of the past century seems to have availed itself of the advances in science primarily under the rubric of philosophy of science, especially using physics as the exemplar of scientific inquiry and almost entirely in service of developing an adequate epistemology (and related logic). Though there has been some philosophical work using biological sciences as areas of inquiry, (...) this is most often a matter of investigating either the logic or content of the life sciences as it relates to that of physics or chemistry; for example, trying to determine the proper method and scope of reduction. Cognitive science has been a fruitful avenue for philosophy of mind, but in most cases the dominant model sees mind as “software” able to be understood independently of the process of evolution that led to the human brain.Very little work (until the past half decade) has used advances in the life sciences as fodder for philosophic speculation in areas such as ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and so on, though some subfields, like medical ethics, provide exceptions. American pragmatic naturalists, on the other hand, from the second half of the ninteenth century into the middle of the twentieth, insisted that the content of the life sciences was essential in understanding human nature. John Dewey, for example, thoroughly incorporated the premise of humans as biological organisms making our way in environments that must be navigated using natural powers and natural solutions to impediments to action. George Herbert Mead provides another example of a fully naturalized conception of human existence, especially as biological organisms in social interaction in various spheres.What I am particularly concerned with here is making sense of the moral sphere with a conception of the human subject as a product of evolution and both socially constituted and uniquely integrated in an environment (more [End Page 63] carefully—a related suite of environments). The beginning point of this re-framing is in Mead’s notion of the social constitution of human being. Most readers of Mead take up such constitution only in the arena of what Mead calls “significant gesture,” using spoken language, especially in propositional form, as exemplary and as providing the foundation for mind, self-consciousness, and so on. But Mead’s concept of sociality is much wider in scope than this; the concept is fundamental to his cosmology. Furthermore, Mead’s notion of sociality is closely linked to his claim that the emergence of true novelty is possible in a fully naturalized cosmos.Without exploring in greater depth Mead’s contribution to thinking about sociality as a precondition for the most fundamental natural processes,2 I would like to use a broadened version of this to frame some contemporary work in biology, ecology, and cognitive science as they relate to human existence, especially in terms of how we may think productively about the moral sphere.In earlier work, I noted that there is a ubiquitous premise in Western moral theories that I believe is mistaken—or at least worthy of serious reconsideration. Most moral theory takes as axiomatic that whatever feature makes us uniquely human is the same feature that, when perfected, makes us moral. That is, that being “good” at being human makes us “good” humans. This is obviously so for Aristotle, insofar as it is rationality that is our special ergon, and it is using rationality well and beautifully that constitutes human virtue. But I think similar assumptions underlie much of moral theory, ancient and modern, and extend to contemporary work that takes language (or concept) use as peculiarly human and sees linguistic (or conceptual) analysis of moral claims as the proper domain of ethical theory.It seems that this presupposition, in part insisting that morality is uniquely human, is put in question if we take seriously evolution through natural selection and understand the human species to be as much a product of natural selection as any other species. There has been a good deal of ethological work done in the past several decades pointing out the protomoral capacities of other highly social animals, especially in those species to which we are most closely related (see, for example... (shrink)

Contributors: Steven Barbone, Laurent Bove, Edwin Curley, Valérie Debuiche, Michael Della Rocca, Simon B. Duffy, Daniel Garber, Pascale Gillot, Céline Hervet, Jonathan Israel, Chantal Jaquet, Mogens Lærke, Jacqueline Lagrée, Martin Lin, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Pierre-François Moreau, Steven Nadler, Knox Peden, Alison Peterman, Charles Ramond, Michael A. Rosenthal, Pascal Sévérac, Hasana Sharp, Jack Stetter, Ariel Suhamy, Lorenzo Vinciguerra.

Naturalism dominated twentieth century American philosophy.1 Naturalism is a philosophical worldview that relies upon experience, reason, and especially science for developing an understanding of reality. Naturalism demands that these three modes of understanding together shall control our notion of reality. Varieties of naturalism emerge because the many essential factors of experience, reason, and science can be coherently related in numerous ways. All naturalisms demand that experience, reason, and science be taken most seriously so that no fourth mode (...) of understanding can be permitted to override them. This triadic unity moderates the excesses of phenomenalism and idealism, and filters out spiritualism and .. (shrink)

American cultural technologies of the early nineteenth century shaped Nature and the synonymous "native" in contradictory ways: celebrating the wilderness but then transforming it by cultivation, mourning lost "natives" (both people and species) while also naturalizing the succession of new Euro-American settlers. Settler colonial geopolitics understood its own territorial claims in association with the retreats, migrations, and expansions of select species populations: cattle replacing American bison or Euro-Americans replacing Indians on the western frontier. In this way, (...) Euro-American descendants of settlers who then considered themselves "natives" could be the natural stewards to "preserve" or "reform" wild remnants of nature while also identifying against the encroachment of the Old World. Technological arts as varied as moving panoramas and picturesque sketches depicted and enacted civilization overtaking the wild frontier through visual tours. This chapter explores how the sketch fits into technologies of seeing accompanying American settler colonialism and points to moments when it suggests ecological processes of ongoing passage rather than terminal extinction or succession. (shrink)

This encyclopedia article outlines the history of Latin American philosophy: the thinking of its indigenous peoples, the debates over conquest and colonization, the arguments for national independence in the eighteenth century, the challenges of nation-building and modernization in the nineteenth century, the concerns over various forms of development in the twentieth century, and the diverse interests in Latin American philosophy during the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than attempt to provide (...) an exhaustive and impossibly long list of scholars’ names and dates, this article outlines the history of Latin American philosophy while trying to provide a meaningful sense of detail by focusing briefly on individual thinkers whose work points to broader philosophical trends that are inevitably more complex and diverse than any encyclopedic treatment can hope to capture. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Given as an address to the American Philosophical Association on the occasion of its centennial, this paper examines the character and standing of American philosophy now and at the outset of the twentieth century as seen (then and now) from a British point of view. A century ago Britain was itself the unquestioned leader of Anglo-Saxon thought. Now, however, as in so many areas, the US is the pre-eminent world power. This status brings prestige and (...) various benefits but it also carries responsibilities. In considering the latter I recall some virtues of an earlier generation of American philosophers, especially as they were possessed by William James. (shrink)

Professional philosophers have tended either to shrug off American philosophy as negligible or derivative or to date American philosophy from the work of twentieth century analytical positivists such as Quine. Russell Goodman expands on the revisionist position developed by Stanley Cavell, that the most interesting strain of American thought proceeds not from Puritan theology or from empirical science but from a peculiarly American kind of Romanticism. This insight leads Goodman, through Cavell, back to (...) Emerson and Thoreau and thence to William James and John Dewey, as they assimilated to American circumstances and intellectual habits the currents of European thought from Kant to Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: The Span of Early American Philosophy The Context of Early American Thought The Trajectory of Early American Philosophy Seventeenth‐Century Puritanism Early Eighteenth Century Later Eighteenth Century Conclusion.

Review of Stetter, J., & Ramond, C... Spinoza in 21st-century American and French philosophy: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Introduction -- Defining pluralism : Simon Pokagon, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Thomas fortune -- Evolution and American Indian philosophy -- Feminist resistance : Anna Julia Cooper, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Labor, empire and the social gospel : Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Jane Addams -- A new name for an old way of thinking : William James -- Making ideas clear : Charles Sanders Peirce -- The beloved community and its discontents : Josiah Royce and (...) the realists -- War, anarchism, and sex : Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger -- Democracy and social ethics : John Dewey -- Naturalism and idealism, fear, and conventionality : Mary Whiton Calkins and Elsie Clews Parsons -- Race riots and the color line : W. E. B. du Bois -- Philosophy reacts : Hartley Burr Alexander and Morris R. Cohen -- Creative experience : Mary Parker Follett -- Cultural pluralism : Horace Kallen and Alain Locke -- War and the rise of logical positivism : Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap -- Mccarthyism and American empiricism : Jacob Loewenberg, Henry Sheffer, C. I. Lewis, and Charles Morris -- The linguistic turn : Gustav Bergmann, May Brodbeck, and W. V. O. Quine -- Resisting the turn : Donald Davidson, Wilfrid Sellars, and the pluralist rebellion -- Philosophy outside : John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Rachel Carson -- Economics and technology : Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills and John Kenneth Galbraith -- Politics : John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, and Noam Chomsky -- Civil rights : Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright and James Baldwin -- Black power : Malcolm X, James Cone, Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, and Cornel West -- Latin American American philosophy -- Red power, indigenous philosophy : Vine Deloria, Jr. and contemporary American Indian thought -- Feminism -- Engaged philosophy and the environment -- American philosophy today -- Recovering and sustaining the American tradition -- American philosophy revitalized -- The spirit of American philosophy in the new century. (shrink)

The recently published Cambridge Companion to Spinoza contains a fine essay by Pierre- Francois Moreau on Spinoza’s reception and on his influence during the more than three hundred years that have passed since his death. In Moreau’s twenty-five page article we find a brief paragraph on the novelist George Eliot and half a sentence on Ed Curley. There is not another mention, at all, of any other philosopher from an English-speaking land since the seventeenth century – nothing on how (...) Spinoza’s ideas were received in England, North America or Australia. Not a word on any influence that Spinoza might have had on later thinkers in those countries. (shrink)

This article systematically surveys the history of Anglo-American philosophy in Taiwan since the late nineteenth century. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it argues that pragmatism remained influential given the dominance of continental philosophy in Japanese colonized Taiwan, where the universal values assumed by pragmatists were used to resist the Empire’s ideology, after WWII, immigrated Chinese scholars brought in more novelty to Taiwanese philosophy than the Vienna circle diasporas brought to their Anglo-American counterparts, in which liberal (...) scholars’ emphasis on science and democracy challenged Chiang’s dictatorship and Chinese nationalism, and analytic philosophy thrived with the advance of democratizing in the 1980s, which, in turn, diversified the philosophy in 1990s Taiwan. Accordingly, Anglo-American philosophy was never confined to the academic ivory tower but had positive impacts on Taiwan’s centennial social transformation. (shrink)