Painting by Howard Chandler Christy of the scene at the Philadelphia Convention which led to the signing of the United States Constitution, an important document in American political and legal philosophy.
American philosophy is the activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophers affiliated with the United States. 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 political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville gave his own more detailed definition of a "Philosophical Method Among the Americans" in the opening paragraph of Book Two of Democracy In America.
I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States... Nevertheless it is easy to perceive that almost all the inhabitants of the United States conduct their understanding in the same manner, and govern it by the same rules; that is to say, that without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical method, they are in possession of one, common to the whole people. To evade the bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise, and doing better; to seek the reason of things for one's self, and in one's self alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to aim at the substance through the form; – such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans...[In] most of the operations of the mind, each American appeals to the individual exercise of his own understanding alone.
17th century
The American philosophical tradition began at the time of the European colonization of the New World. The Puritans arrival in New England set the earliest American philosophy into the religious tradition,
and there was also an emphasis on the relationship between the
individual and the community. This is evident by the early colonial
documents such as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641).
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.
18th century
18th-century American philosophy 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 American incarnation of the European Enlightenment that is associated with the political thought of the Founding Fathers.
The 18th century saw the introduction of Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment philosophers Descartes, Newton, Locke, Wollaston, and Berkeley to Colonial British America. Two native-born Americans, Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards,
were first influenced by these philosophers; they then adapted and
extended their Enlightenment ideas to develop their own American
theology and philosophy. Both were originally ordained Puritan
Congregationalist ministers who embraced much of the new learning of the
Enlightenment. Both were Yale educated and Berkeley influenced idealists who became influential college presidents. Both were influential in the development of American political philosophy and the works of the Founding Fathers. 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 William Wollaston's Natural Religion. Late in the century, Scottish Innate or Common Sense Realism
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.
Introduction of the Enlightenment into America
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." Then 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 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.
One of his students for a brief time was a fifteen-year-old Jonathan
Edwards. "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." But each had a quite different view on the issues of predestination versus freewill, original sin versus the pursuit of happiness though practicing virtue, and the education of children.
Reformed Calvinism
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Jonathan Edwards is considered to be "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." Working to unite Christian Platonism with an empiricist epistemology, with the aid of Newtonian physics, Edwards was deeply influenced by George Berkeley,
himself an empiricist, and Edwards derived his importance of the
immaterial for the creation of human experience from Bishop Berkeley.
The non-material mind consists of understanding and will, and it
is understanding, interpreted in a Newtonian framework, that leads to
Edwards' fundamental metaphysical category 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 reformed Puritan theology using Enlightenment
ideas from natural philosophy, and Locke, Newton, and Berkeley, he
remained a Calvinist and hard determinist. Jonathan Edwards also 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 lead to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God
which stands as the sole arbiter of human fortune.
Enlightenment
While
the 17th- and early 18th-century American philosophical tradition was
decidedly marked by religious themes and the Reformation reason of
Ramus, the 18th century saw more reliance on science and the new learning of the Age of Enlightenment, along with an idealist belief in the perfectibility of human beings through teaching ethics and moral philosophy, laissez-faire economics, and a new focus on political matters.
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.
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. So he crafted one. Johnson's
moral philosophy was influenced by Descartes and Locke, but more
directly by William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated
and the idealist philosopher of George Berkeley, with whom Johnson
studied while Berkley was in Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731. Johnson
strongly rejected Calvin's doctrine of Predestination and believed that
people were autonomous moral agents endowed with freewill and Lockean natural rights. His fusion philosophy 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.
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. 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. Three members of the Committee of Five who edited the Declaration of Independence were closely connected to Johnson: his educational partner, promoter, friend, and publisher Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, his King's College student Robert R. Livingston of New York, and his son William Samuel Johnson's legal protegee and Yale treasurer Roger Sherman of Connecticut. Johnson's son William Samuel Johnson was the Chairman of the Committee of Style that wrote the U.S. Constitution: edits to a draft version are in his hand in the Library of Congress.
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.
The Constitution sets forth a federated 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.
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 Maximilien Robespierre, François-Marie Arouet (better known by his pen name, Voltaire), and Rousseau. However, an investigation of 106 contributors to the Declaration of Independence
between September 5, 1774 and July 4, 1776 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 that at this time of life he was rather strongly affiliated
with a denomination and that the influence of Whitefield and Edwards
reached even into Virginia. But the founders who studied or embraced
Johnson, Franklin, and Smith's non-denominational moral philosophy 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.
An alternate moral philosophy to the domestic American Practical
Idealism, called variously Scottish Innate Sense moral philosophy (by
Jefferson), Scottish Commonsense Philosophy, or Scottish Common Sense Realism, 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 moral philosophy was based on the work of the Scottish philosopher 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 innate sense moral philosophy. Some revisionist commentators, including Garry Wills' Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, claimed in the 1970s that this imported Scottish philosophy was the basis for the founding documents of America. However, other historians have questioned this assertion. Ronald Hamowy published a critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America,
concluding that "the moment [Wills's] statements are subjected to
scrutiny, they appear a mass of confusions, uneducated guesses, and
blatant errors of fact." Another investigation of all of the contributors to the United States Declaration of Independence suggests that only Jonathan Witherspoon and John Adams embraced the imported Scottish morality.
While Scottish innate sense realism would in the decades after the
Revolution become the dominate moral philosophy in classrooms of
American academia for almost 100 years, it was not a strong influence at the time of the Declaration was crafted.
Johnson's American Practical Idealism and Edwards' Reform Puritan
Calvinism were far stronger influences on the men of the Continental
Congress and on the Declaration.
Thomas Paine, the English 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."
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."
It was the generation of "Founding Grandfathers", men such as
President Samuel Johnson, President Jonathan Edwards, President Thomas
Clap, Benjamin Franklin, and Provost William Smith, who "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."
19th century
The 19th century saw the rise of Romanticism in America. The American incarnation of Romanticism was transcendentalism
and it stands as a major American innovation. The 19th century also saw
the rise of the school of pragmatism, along with a smaller, Hegelian philosophical movement led by George Holmes Howison that was focused in St. Louis, though the influence of American pragmatism far outstripped that of the small Hegelian movement.
Other reactions to materialism included the "Objective idealism" of Josiah Royce, and the "Personalism," sometimes called "Boston personalism," of Borden Parker Bowne.
Transcendentalism
Henry David Thoreau, 1856
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ca. 1857
Transcendentalism in the United States was marked by an emphasis on subjective experience, and can be viewed as a reaction against modernism and intellectualism in general and the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview in particular. Transcendentalism is marked by the holistic
belief in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and
empirical, and this perfect state can only be attained by one's own
intuition and personal reflection, as opposed to either industrial
progress and scientific advancement or the principles and prescriptions
of traditional, organized religion. The most notable transcendentalist
writers include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
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, as opposed to
scientific knowledge that is the result of empirical sense experience.
Things such as scientific tools, political institutions, and the
conventional rules of morality as dictated by traditional religion need
to be transcended. This is found in Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods where transcendence is achieved through immersion in nature and the distancing of oneself from society.
Darwinism in America
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.
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.
Pragmatism
Perhaps the most influential school of thought that is uniquely American is pragmatism. It began in the late nineteenth century in the United States 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
Polymath, logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) coined the term "pragmatism" in the 1870s. He was a member of The Metaphysical Club, which was a conversational club of intellectuals that also included Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and another early figure of pragmatism, William James. In addition to making profound contributions to semiotics, 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 "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 argued for pragmatism as summed up in that which he later
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". Peirce
emphasized that a conception is general, such that its meaning is not a
set of actual, definite effects themselves. Instead the conception of an
object is equated to a conception of that object's effects to a general
extent of their conceivable implications for informed practice. Those
conceivable practical implications are the conception's meaning.
The maxim is intended to help fruitfully clarify confusions
caused, for example, by distinctions that make formal but not practical
differences. Traditionally one analyzes an idea into parts (his example:
a definition of truth as a sign's correspondence to its object). To
that needful but confined step, the maxim adds a further and
practice-oriented step (his example: a definition of truth as sufficient
investigation's destined end).
It is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection
arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and
disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the formation of
explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the use and improvement of
verification.
Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory
hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between
deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, though he himself
was a mathematician of logic and a founder of statistics.
Peirce's philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, both fallibilism and anti-skeptical belief that truth is discoverable and immutable, logic as formal semiotic (including semiotic elements and classes of signs, modes of inference, and methods of inquiry along with pragmatism and critical common-sensism), Scholastic realism, theism, objective idealism, and belief in the reality of continuity of space, time, and law, and in the reality of absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love as principles operative in the cosmos and as modes of its evolution.
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 famous as the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, his monumental tome The Principles of Psychology, and his lecture "The Will to Believe."
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 is also known for his radical empiricism
which holds that relations between objects are as real as the objects
themselves. James was also a pluralist in that he believed that there
may actually be multiple correct accounts of truth. He rejected the correspondence theory of truth
and instead held that truth involves a belief, facts about the world,
other background beliefs, and future consequences of those beliefs.
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
(1859–1952), while still engaging in the lofty academic philosophical
work of James and Peirce before him, 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.
20th century
George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher
Pragmatism, which began in the 19th century in America, by the
beginning of the 20th century began to be accompanied by other
philosophical schools of thought, and was eventually eclipsed by them,
though only temporarily. The 20th century saw the emergence of process
philosophy, itself influenced by the scientific world-view and Einstein's theory of relativity. The middle of the 20th century was witness to the increase in popularity of the philosophy of language and analytic philosophy in America. 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.
Rejection of idealism
Pragmatism continued its influence into the 20th century, and Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana was one of the leading proponents of pragmatism in this period. He held that idealism was an outright contradiction and rejection of common sense.
He held that, if something must be certain in order to be knowledge,
then it seems no knowledge may be possible, and the result will be skepticism. 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. Santayana was accompanied in the intellectual climate of
'common sense' philosophy by the thinkers of the New Realism movement, such as Ralph Barton Perry.
Process philosophy
Process philosophy embraces the Einsteinian world-view, and its main proponents include Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The core belief of process philosophy is the claim that events and processes are the principal ontological categories. 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. Process
philosophy is Heraclitan in the sense that a fundamental ontological category is change. Charles Hartshorne was also responsible for developing the process philosophy of Whitehead into process theology.
Analytic philosophy
An image of W.V.O. Quine as seen on his passport
The middle of the 20th century was the beginning of the dominance of analytic philosophy in America. Analytic philosophy, prior to its arrival in America, had begun in Europe with the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists. 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 positivists fled Germany to Britain and America, and this helped
reinforce the dominance of analytic philosophy in the United States in
subsequent years.
W.V.O. Quine,
while not a logical positivist, shared their view that philosophy
should stand shoulder to shoulder with science in its pursuit of
intellectual clarity and understanding of the world. He criticized the
logical positivists and the analytic/synthetic distinction of knowledge in his essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and advocated for his "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.
Saul Kripke at Juquehy Beach
Saul Kripke, a student of Quine at Harvard,
has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy. Kripke was ranked among
the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years in a poll
conducted by Brian Leiter (Leiter Reports: a Philosophy Blog; open access poll) Kripke is best known for four contributions to philosophy: (1) Kripke semantics for modal and related logics, published in several essays beginning while he was still in his teens. (2) His 1970 Princeton lectures Naming and Necessity (published in 1972 and 1980), that significantly restructured the philosophy of language and, as some have put it, "made metaphysics respectable again". (3) His interpretation of the philosophy of Wittgenstein. (4) His theory of truth. He has also made important contributions to set theory.
David Kellogg Lewis, another student of Quine at Harvard, was ranked as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century in a poll conducted by Brian Leiter (open access poll). He 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.
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.
Return of political philosophy
The
analytic philosophers troubled themselves with the abstract and the
conceptual, and American philosophy did not fully return to social and
political concerns (that dominated American philosophy at the time of
the founding of the United States) until the 1970s.
The return to political and social concerns included the popularity of works of Ayn Rand, who promoted ethical egoism (the praxis of the belief system she called Objectivism) in her novels, The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957. These two novels gave birth to the Objectivist movement and would influence a small group of students called The Collective, one of whom was 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, that human beings should act in accordance with their own rational self-interest, and that the proper form of economic organization is laissez-faire capitalism. Academic philosophers have been highly critical of the quality and intellectual rigor of Rand's work, but she remains a popular, albeit controversial, figure within the American libertarian movement.
In 1971 John Rawls published his book A Theory of Justice. The book puts forth Rawls' view of justice as fairness, one which is based on a form of social contract theory. Rawls employs the use of 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 which 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.
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 their
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."
Alasdair MacIntyre, while he was born and educated in the United Kingdom, has spent around forty years living and working in the United States. He is responsible for the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, a moral theory first propounded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He is considered the preeminent Thomist
political philosopher. He holds 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 recommends a return to genuine political communities where individuals can properly acquire their virtues.
Outside academic philosophy, political and social concerns took center stage with the Civil Rights Movement and the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Feminism
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. 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.
Contemporary philosophy
Towards the end of the 20th century there was a resurgence of interest in pragmatism. 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.
The debates that occur within the philosophy of mind have taken center stage. American philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, John Searle, as well as Patricia and Paul Churchland, continue the discussion of such issues as the nature of mind and the hard problem of consciousness, a philosophical problem indicated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers.
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 with British philosophers such as Andy Clark defend this view, seeing it as a natural development of pragmatism, and of the thinking of Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty among others.
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.
Philosopher Cornel West is known for his analysis of American cultural life with regards to race, gender, and class issues, as well as his associations with pragmatism and transcendentalism.
Alvin Plantinga is a Christian analytic philosopher known for his free will defense with respect 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 Yahweh. Michael C. Rea
has developed Plantinga's thought by claiming that both naturalism and
supernaturalism are research programs that have to be adopted as a
basis for research.
