American philosophy

American Enlightenment

In 1714, a donation of 800 books from England, collected by Colonial Agent Jeremiah Dummer, arrived at Yale.^[16] They contained what became known as "The New Learning", including "the works of Locke, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Shakespeare",^[16] 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 (1605). 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."^[17] 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."^[18]

Johnson was appointed tutor at Yale in 1716. He began to teach the Enlightenment curriculum there, and thus began the American Enlightenment. Samuel Johnson has been called "The Founder of American Philosophy"^[19] and the "first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there".^[20] 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.^[21]

Johnson was a proponent of the view that "the essence of true religion is morality", and believed that "the problem of denominationalism"^[22] could be solved by teaching a non-denominational common moral philosophy acceptable to all religions. Johnson's moral philosophy was influenced by Descartes and Locke, but more directly by William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), and the subjective idealist and empiricist philosopher George Berkeley, with whom Johnson studied while Berkeley was living in Newport, Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731.

Reformed Christianity

Jonathan Edwards was "America's most important and original philosophical theologian."^[23] Noted for his energetic sermons, such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), credited with starting the First Great Awakening, Edwards emphasized "the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness."^[23]

Edwards was an associate of George Whitefield and was once a student of Samuel Johnson, who transmitted the influence of Bishop Berkeley. Edwards tried to unite a Christian Platonism with an empiricist epistemology, using the aid of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Newtonian physics.^[24]

For Edwards, there is an immaterial mind consisting of understanding and will, and it is understanding that leads to Edwards' fundamental notion 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.^[25]

Though Edwards revised Puritan theology using Enlightenment ideas from Berkeley, Locke, and Newton, he remained a Calvinist (or Reformed Christian) and hard determinist believing in predestination. He rejected the freedom of the will, believing we can do as we please, but we cannot please as we please.^[26] According to Edwards, neither good works nor self-originating faith leads to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God which stands as the sole arbiter of human fortune.^[27]

American Practical Idealism

Johnson strongly rejected Calvin's doctrine of predestination and believed that people were endowed with free will and natural rights. His original fusion of natural religion and idealism, which has been called "American Practical Idealism",^[28] was developed as a series of college textbooks in seven editions between 1731 and 1754, such as Elementa Philosophica (1752). These works, and his dialogue Raphael, written at the time of the Stamp Act crisis (1765), includes sections on economics, psychology, the teaching of children, and political philosophy.^[29]

Elementa Philosophica contains his moral philosophy,^[30] which 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. These men "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."^[31]

It was influential in its day: it has been estimated that about half of American college students between 1743 and 1776,^[32] 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.^[33] 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."^[34][d]

Franklin's natural philosophy

The meaning of the term "philosophy" was not as narrowly circumscribed as it is today, and included science or natural philosophy, and the broad application of reason to well-being.^[36] Back in Europe, publisher Benjamin Franklin was considered America's "first philosopher."^[37] Franklin founded the Junto in 1727, and eventually the American Philosophical Society in 1743, with associates like James Alexander, botanist John Bartram, William Coleman, Thomas Hopkinson, and silversmith Philip Syng, creator of the Syng inkstand, used to sign the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.^[38][39]

Franklin was known for his aphorisms found in works like Poor Richard's Almanack. Franklin's philosophical vision was broadly pragmatic. To quote him, "What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use?"^[36] In 1752, Franklin proved lightning and electricity were the same phenomenon with his famous Kite experiment, leading to the invention of the lightning rod.^[e]

Founders' political philosophy

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, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, 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 Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Much of the debate surrounding the Constitution is found in the writings of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison published as The Federalist Papers.

Founders' religion

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 Christians. Some professed personal concepts of deism, as was characteristic of other European Enlightenment thinkers, such as French philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau, or French Revolutionary Robespierre.^[46] They were at least influenced by Wollaston's natural religion, as evidenced by "the Laws of Nature, and Nature's God" and "the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration.^[47]

However, an investigation of 106 contributors to the Declaration of Independence found that only two men (Franklin and Jefferson), might be called quasi-deists or non-denominational Christians;^[48] all the others were publicly members of denominational Christian churches. Even Franklin professed the need for a "public religion" and attended various churches.^[49] Jefferson was vestryman at the evangelical Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville, a church Jefferson founded and named in 1777,^[50] illustrating the influence of Edwards reached even into Virginia.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the English deist intellectual, pamphleteer, and revolutionary, wrote Common Sense (1776), The American Crisis, and Rights of Man (1791). Paine was an influential promoter of Enlightenment political ideas in America. Common Sense justified the Revolution and has been described as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era".^[51] 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."^[52] Largely due to his advocacy for deism, Paine died in obscurity.^[53]

Boston Tea Party organizer Thomas Young (1731–1777), who named the state of Vermont, was another revolutionary American deist, influencing Ethan Allen (1738–1789), leader of the Green Mountain Boys and author of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man (1785).^[54]

Scottish influence

The Scottish Enlightenment was introduced into American Colleges in 1768 by John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a Scottish immigrant and educator who was invited to be President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).^[55] He was a Presbyterian minister and a delegate who joined the Continental Congress just days before the Declaration was debated.

His outlook was based on the work of the Scottish moral sense theorist and utilitarian Francis Hutcheson, who also influenced John Adams (1735–1826).^[56] 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. (1745–1801), and taught his own Hutcheson-influenced form of Scottish moral philosophy.^[57]

The Scottish-American James Wilson (1742–1798) was influenced by Thomas Reid's common sense realism and preferred Reid's justification for a people's right to rebel against an unjust ruler.^[58] Wilson felt Reid had shown Locke's representationalist views led to David Hume's skepticism. Witherspoon's successor Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751–1819) was a dedicated follower of Reid and spread his ideas at Princeton.^[59]

Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations (1776), the classic statement of laissez-faire economics.^[60][g] Thomas Pownall (1722–1805) anonymously published an essay for free trade titled A Memorial Most Humbly Addressed to the Sovereigns of Europe (1780), influenced by Smith.^[62] Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was also influential, along with Hutcheson.

David Hume's physician William Cullen was a teacher of physicians Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), and John Morgan (1735–1789). Rush founded Dickinson College and Morgan founded the first medical school in America, at the College of Philadelphia.^[63]

While not a strong influence at the time the Declaration was crafted,^[64][65][h] afterwards, the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment become an alternative to American Practical Idealism, and was the dominant moral philosophy in classrooms of American academia for almost 100 years, until the Civil War.^[72]

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson, c. 1857

Henry David Thoreau, 1856

American transcendentalism is marked by the holistic belief in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical, and an emphasis on subjective experience. It can be viewed as a reaction against modernism, intellectualism, and mechanistic reductionism. The transcendentalists all desired a deep return to nature. They believed genuine knowledge is intuitive and personal, and arises out of personal immersion and reflection in nature, not industrial progress and scientific advancement, nor the principles and prescriptions of traditional, organized religion.^[73]

Henry David Thoreau

Influenced by Emerson, the Transcendental Club, and the importance of nature, Charles Stearns Wheeler (1816–1843) built a shanty at Flints Pond in 1836. Considered the first transcendentalist outdoor living experiment, Wheeler used his shanty during his summer vacations from Harvard from 1836 to 1842.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) stayed at Wheeler's shanty for six weeks during the summer of 1837, and got the idea that he wanted to build his own cabin, later realized at Walden Pond in 1845.^[77] Thoreau's book Walden (1854) shows his attempt to achieve transcendence through immersion in nature and the distancing of oneself from society. Thoreau is also known for his essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) which argues against compliance with unjust laws.

Personalism

William Torrey Harris, c. 1908

Henry Clay Brockmeyer

Transcendentalism influenced a school of idealism and anti-materialism in America known as the St. Louis Hegelians.^[83] Their leaders William Torrey Harris (1835–1909) and Henry Clay Brockmeyer (1826–1906) published the Journal of Speculative Philosophy from 1867 to 1893, America's first secular, non-theological philosophy journal.^[84][j]

The founder of "personal idealism" or "California personalism" was St. Louis Hegelian George Holmes Howison (1834–1916). There was also the "Personalism," sometimes called "Boston personalism," of Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910). Personalism is to be distinguished from Hegelian absolute idealism; it does not believe individual persons are absorbed into the absolute. Scottish-American Thomas Davidson (1840–1900) held a view combining St. Louis Hegelianism with Aristotelianism he called "apeirotheism", which entailed each individual has the potential to be a God.^[85]

Civil War and philosophy

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) was a leading pro-slavery intellectual influenced by Scotsman Thomas Carlyle who in his works Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857) rebuked John Locke, Adam Smith, and the entire liberal tradition, preferring feudalism. Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809–1877) wrote Liberty and Slavery (1856), "the most extensive philosophical treatment of slavery ever produced by a Southern academic".^[86] Bledsoe is cited by Lost Cause advocates.

The Revolutions of 1848 brought more German immigration to America with the Forty-eighters, several of whom read philosophy and fought for the Union Army. The most prominent was Carl Schurz (1829–1906). Fritz Anneke (1818–1872) was a Marxist revolutionary and Union Army officer. Joseph Weydemeyer (1818–1866) was a Marxist revolutionary and lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. August Willich (1810–1878) was a communist who served for the Union cause. There was also pediatrician Abraham Jacobi (1830–1919), a founder of the New York Communist Club along with Friedrich Sorge (1828–1906).^[87]

Darwinism in America

The release of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory in On the Origin of Species (1859) had a strong impact on American philosophy. John Fiske (1842–1901) and Chauncey Wright (1830–1875) 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 (1840–1910). 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.^[k] The laissez-faire beliefs of Sumner and Spencer do not advocate coercive breeding to achieve a planned outcome.

Social darwinism was also closely associated with classical liberalism. 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. In 1876, Sumner became the first to teach a course titled "sociology" in the English-speaking world.

Pragmatism

The most influential school of thought that is uniquely American is pragmatism. It began in the late nineteenth century, most notably with Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, all of whom published articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.^[84] 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.^[88]

Charles Sanders Peirce

Harvard philosopher, logician, mathematician, scientist, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) coined the term "pragmatism" in the 1870s.^[89][l]

Peirce was a chemist and surveyor, who read Kant, as well as British philosopher Richard Whately. Whately started a revival in logic with his Elements of Logic (1826), in reaction to the anti-logical aspects of British empiricism. As a logician, Peirce was notable for pioneering the logic of relations (or relatives) and conceiving of logic gates.^[m]

Peirce's philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, combining a "critical common-sensism" (Scottish common sense realism plus fallibilism), with logic (including Peirce's semiotics, modes of inference, and methods of inquiry), as well as scholastic realism for universals, Christianity, objective idealism influenced by Kant, and belief in the reality of continuity, chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love as principles operative in the cosmos.

Peirce was a member of The Metaphysical Club, which also included Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and William James.^[88] In addition to making profound contributions to semiotics (or the study of signs), 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 1879, Peirce was appointed as logic lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

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 harkens back to Descartes' notion of "clear and distinct ideas", and sums up pragmatism by what he 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". The theory is that the meaning of a concept is equivalent to its practical implications, as a method of experimentational mental reflection.^[91] Peirce coined the notion of abduction as distinct from induction and deduction.

In semiotics, the first two major theories are those of Peirce and Swiss theorist Ferdinand de Saussure. As a mathematician, Peirce was a founder of statistics.

C. I. Lewis wrote, "The contributions of C. S. Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer—at least in the nineteenth century." Paul Weiss wrote Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician".^[92] British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote Peirce "was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".^[93]

William James

William James (1842–1910) was the most famous American philosopher of his time.^[94] He was the brother of novelist Henry James. He started Harvard's psychology department, and so was "an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy."^[95][n] G. Stanley Hall was a psychologist influenced by James.

James is best known as the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), his monumental tome The Principles of Psychology (1890), and his lecture "The Will to Believe" (1896). James, along with Peirce,^[97] saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes elaborated into a radical new philosophical method of clarifying ideas and thereby resolving dilemmas. In Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1910), 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.^[98] James rejected the correspondence theory of truth.

James is also known for his radical empiricism which holds that relations between objects are as real as the objects themselves. 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.^[99]

John Dewey

John Dewey (1859–1952) studied under Peirce at Johns Hopkins University. Dewey engaged in the academic philosophical work of James and Peirce before him, but 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.^[100]

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."^[101] 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.^[102]

George Herbert Mead

Besides Peirce, James, and Dewey, pragmatism proved influential for a number of thinkers. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was a pragmatist and sociologist influenced by Dewey and Charles Horton Cooley. Mead was known for his theory of symbolic interactionism and social behaviorism.

Absolute idealism

The most prominent advocate of American idealism was absolute idealist and Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916).^[104] As Royce puts it, "the world is...such stuff as ideas are made of."^[105] Royce wrote such works as The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), The World and the Individual (1899–1901), The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), and The Problem of Christianity (1913). Royce was a student of Peirce at Johns Hopkins, and was published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.^[84] William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966) followed Royce at Harvard.

According to Bertrand Russell, by the end of the nineteenth century, "the leading academic philosophers, both in America and Britain, were largely Hegelian".^[106]

Rejection of idealism

Santayana

While there were still some 20th century idealists in America, like Brand Blanshard (1892–1987), idealism mostly fell out of favor, mirroring the British revolt against idealism. Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952) was one of the leading proponents of pragmatism and realism in this period. He held that idealism entailed skepticism and was a rejection of common sense. According to Santayana, knowledge involved a sort of faith, which he termed "animal faith".

In Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) he asserts knowledge is not the result of reasoning. Instead, knowledge is what is required in order to act and successfully engage with the world.^[109] 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 also contributed to aesthetics, writing The Sense of Beauty (1896).

Analytic philosophy

The middle of the 20th century was the beginning of the dominance of analytic philosophy and the "linguistic turn" in America. Analytic philosophy, prior to its arrival in America, had begun in Europe with the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. According to logical positivism, the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies, and those of science are empirically verifiable.^[112] Any other claim, including the claims of metaphysics and most of philosophy, are meaningless (this theory is called verificationism). With the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, many logical positivists fled Germany to Britain and America, and this helped reinforce the dominance of analytic philosophy in the United States in subsequent years.^[1] However, while heavily influenced by logical positivism, ensuing American philosophy would see its demise.

Wittgenstein then had a radical shift and embraced a different philosophy, which influenced Oxford ordinary language philosophy. Morris Weitz (1916–1981) introduced America to the Oxford philosophy.^[113]

Quine's holism

Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) was educated by Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. Quine shared the view that philosophy should be like science and sought to naturalize philosophy. However, he criticized the logical positivists and the analytic/synthetic distinction in his essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), making him at the time the most famous philosopher in America.^[116][117] Quine is also known for his dictum of ontological commitment presented in "On What There Is" (1948), "to be is to be the value of a variable".

Quine advocated for a "web of belief," a kind of coherentist theory of justification. Quine doubted usual theories of meaning, and, instead of logical positivism, advocated a kind of semantic holism and ontological relativity, which explained that no experience occurs in isolation, every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief. This position in science has been dubbed the Duhem–Quine thesis, after Quine and French philosopher Pierre Duhem.

In his magnum opus Word and Object (1960), Quine introduces the gavagai thought experiment and the idea of radical translation, an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the inscrutability of reference.^[118] Quine also coined the terms abstract object and Plato's beard.

Kripke

Saul Kripke (1940–2022), a student of Quine's at Harvard, has remarkably influenced analytic philosophy, and subsequently became the most famous philosopher in America.^[116][o] His contributions include Kripke semantics for modal and related logics, published in several essays beginning while he was still in his teens. Kripke and Barcan both argued identity is a necessary relation. Kripke also has a notable theory of truth, and has made important contributions to set theory (see admissible ordinal and Kripke–Platek set theory).

His 1970 Princeton lectures Naming and Necessity (1980), significantly restructured the philosophy of language, introducing the causal theory of reference for proper names and natural kind terms, in response to the prevailing view of descriptivism. Kripke revived theories of essence and identity and "made metaphysics respectable again".^[120] Kripke argued proper names are rigid designators, or designate the same thing in all possible worlds, unlike descriptions. For example, an election may have turned out differently, so the description "winner of the 1968 US presidential election" might have designated Hubert Humphrey instead of Richard Nixon. However, the name "Richard Nixon" designates the man Richard Nixon, regardless of the election results.

Kant stated that necessity is the criterion for a priori knowledge. Kripke argued that necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H₂O, or gold is atomic number 79. Kripke and Quine's colleague Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) argued for realism about natural kinds. Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment is used to argue water is a natural kind.

Kripke also has a novel, skeptical interpretation of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, known as "Kripkenstein", expounded in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), which contains the rule-following argument.^[121]

David Lewis

David Kellogg Lewis (1941–2001), another student of Quine at Harvard, 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.^[122][p] Lewis applied Quine's dictum of ontological commitment to the statement "There are other ways things could have been;" committing Lewis (by his lights) to the real existence of other ways things could have been. According to Lewis, "actual" is merely an indexical label we give a world when we are in it. In opposition to David Lewis's modal realism is modal actualism, defended by Kripke and Robert Stalnaker (b. 1940).

David Lewis also defended what he called Humean supervenience, and a counterfactual theory of causation, another view of Hume's. Lewis regularly visited Australia.

Epistemology

Owing largely to the Edmund Gettier (1927–2021) paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963)^[124] and the so-called Gettier problem, epistemology has since enjoyed a resurgence as a topic of analytic philosophy. Using epistemic luck, Gettier provided counterexamples to the "justified true belief" (JTB) definition of knowledge, found as early as Plato's dialogue Theaetetus.^[125]

Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) expanded on Hume's problem of induction and developed the new riddle of induction in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955). Roderick Chisholm (1916–1999) studied under pragmatist C. I. Lewis, but rejected his Kantianism for direct realism. He is best known for the problem of the criterion in Theory of Knowledge (1966). Responding to Moore's "here is one hand", Robert Nozick (1938–2002) and Fred Dretske (1932–2013) defended a truth-tracking theory of knowledge and denied epistemic closure. Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) was also a notable American epistemologist.

Process philosophy

Process philosophy embraces the physics of Einstein's theory of relativity, and its main proponents include the British Alfred North Whitehead and the American Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000). The core belief of process philosophy is the claim that events and processes are the principal ontological categories, rather than substances.^[127] 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.^[128] Hartshorne was responsible for developing the process philosophy of Whitehead into process theology. Paul Weiss (1901–2002) also defended process philosophy.

Political philosophy

John Rawls

Robert Nozick

Communitarianism

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025), born and educated in the United Kingdom, spent around forty years living and working in the United States. A prominent Thomist political philosopher, MacIntyre held 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".^[133] He recommended returning to genuine political communities where individuals can properly acquire their virtues. MacIntyre defends this "communitarianism" as an alternative to both Rawls' and Nozick's political philosophies.

Ethics

G. E. Moore's view of non-naturalist moral realism is defended by Russ Shafer-Landau (b. 1963) in Moral Realism: A Defence (2003). Logical positivists advocated emotivism, as did Charles Stevenson (1908–1979).

Robert Nozick criticized utilitarianism with the utility monster. John Rawls and Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) revitalized academic interest in deontology. A notable student of Rawls' moral philosophy is animal rights advocate Christine Korsgaard (b. 1952).

Aristotelianism

MacIntyre with After Virtue (1981) was partially responsible for the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, a moral theory first propounded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.^{[134][135][q]} As was Philippa Foot (1920–2010), who, while also a British philosopher, was the granddaughter of American president Grover Cleveland. Michael Slote (b. 1941) is a virtue ethicist.

Outside academic philosophy, University of Chicago president Maynard Hutchins reformed the curriculum according to recommendations by Aristotelian Mortimer Adler (1902–2001). Adler also influenced Sister Miriam Joseph to teach her college students the medieval Trivium of liberal arts. Adler served as chief editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and later founded the Aspen Institute to teach business executives. Richard McKeon (1900–1985) also taught Aristotle during the Hutchins era.

Civil rights

Also outside academic philosophy, political and social concerns took center stage with the Civil Rights Movement and the speech and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) King was a Christian minister and activist known for advancing civil rights for people of color through nonviolence and civil disobedience.

Critical theory

Critical theory—specifically the social theory of the Frankfurt School—influenced philosophy and culture in the United States beginning in the late 1960s.^[136] Critical theory was rooted in the Western European Marxist philosophical tradition that also fled Nazi Germany and sought philosophy that was "practical" and not merely "theoretical", that would help not only to understand the world but to shape it—generally toward human emancipation and freedom from domination.^[137] Its practical and socially transformative orientation was similar to that of earlier American pragmatists such as John Dewey.^[137]

Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in his Eros and Civilization (1955), responded to the pessimism of Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents by arguing for the emancipatory power of the imagination and for a "rationality of gratification", a fusion of Logos and Eros, for envisioning a better world.^[138] In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse argued for a "Great Refusal"—"the protest against that which is", in response to "un-freedoms" and oppressive, conformist social structures.^[138][139] Marcuse influenced Fredric Jameson (1934–2024).

According to Marcuse's student Angela Davis (b. 1944), Marcuse's principled utopianism articulated the ideals of a generation of activists and revolutionaries around the world.^[139][140] His thought influenced the New Left,^[141] notably by the Black power movement^[142] and student movements of the 1960s.^[143] He "was the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on North American intellectual culture" according to Doug Mann.^[144]

American philosophers and writers who have engaged with critical theory include Angela Davis,^[145] Edward Said,^[146] Martha Nussbaum,^[147] bell hooks,^{[148][149][150]} Cornel West,^[151] and Judith Butler.^[152][153]

Feminism

Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is regarded as a catalyst of the second wave of feminism in the U.S.^[154]

Judith Butler's 1990 book Gender Trouble argued for an understanding of gender as socially constructed and is associated with third wave feminism and queer theory.^[155]

While there were earlier writers who would be considered feminist, such as figures of the women's rights and women's suffrage movement like Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grimké, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as second-wave feminism, is notable for its impact in philosophy.^[156]

Betty Friedan's (1921–2006) The Feminine Mystique (1963) proved influential.^[154] 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 philosophy.

Judith Butler's (b. 1956) Gender Trouble (1990), which argued for an understanding of gender as socially constructed and performative, helped establish the academic field of gender studies.^[155] Butler is associated with third wave feminism and queer theory.^[155]

Objectivism

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) penned the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and remains a popular figure within American culture.^[157][158] These two novels gave birth to the Objectivist movement and would influence students, including a young Alan Greenspan, a self-described libertarian who became Chairman of the Federal Reserve.^[159] Objectivism holds that there is an objective external reality that can be known with reason, ethical egoism, and that the proper form of economic organization is laissez-faire capitalism.^[160] Several academic philosophers are highly critical of the quality and intellectual rigor of Rand's work, preferring her work be labeled a kind of pseudo-philosophy.^[161][162]

Neopragmatism

Towards the end of the 20th century, there was a resurgence of interest in pragmatism, known as neopragmatism. Largely responsible for this are Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty (1931–2007). Rorty is famous as the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Putnam is well known for his quasi-empiricism in mathematics,^[163] his challenge of the brain in a vat thought experiment,^[164] and his other work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.

Rorty influenced neopragmatists like black activist Cornel West (b. 1953). Other neopragmatists like foundherentist Susan Haack (1945–2026) are highly critical of Rorty.^[165] Morton White (1917–2016) was a proponent of "holistic pragmatism".

Other contemporary American scholars have renewed an interest in John Dewey's formulation of pragmatic ethics in order to explore the moral imperatives which justify an adherence to the practice of pacifism and nonviolence in the modern world. Specific attention is given to the ethical limitations and contradictions inherent in traditional just war theories when applied to modern forms of warfare including nuclear war and modern deterrence theory. Noteworthy in this group are Robert L. Holmes,^{[166][167][168][169]} Duane Cady^[170][171] and Barry L. Gan.^[172]

Philosophy of mind

The debates that occur within the philosophy of mind have taken center stage in America,^[r] with discussion of such issues as the nature of mind and the hard problem of consciousness, a philosophical problem named by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers.^[174] Motivated by logical positivism, many philosophers were behaviorists. The criticisms of type identity theory led to Donald Davidson's theory of anomalous monism.^[175] The dominant theory is functionalism. The view was first associated with Wilfrid Sellars, and is defended by such philosophers as Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, William Lycan, and Sydney Shoemaker.^[176]

John Searle (1932–2025) advocated emergent materialism and is notable for his Chinese Room argument against strong AI.^[177] Douglas Hofstadter (b. 1945) also believes the mind is emergent in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), from self-referential "strange loops".^[178]

Patricia (b. 1943) and Paul Churchland (b. 1942) argue for eliminative materialism.^[179] Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) in works like Consciousness Explained (1991) is generally considered an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness (but not about intentionality).^[180] Dennett coined terms like intuition pump.

Thomas Nagel is notable for his anti-physicalist views in What is it like to be a bat? (1974). Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."^[181] This assertion has achieved special status in consciousness studies with "the standard 'what it's like' locution".^[182][183]

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, defend this view and see it as a natural development of pragmatism and of the thinking of Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty among others.^[184]

Philosophy of language

Searle defended descriptivism with cluster theory. Keith Donnellan (1931–2015) was critical of descriptivism. Donald Davidson (1917–2003) is perhaps best known for his thought experiment of Swampman, which argues for semantic externalism, and for his development of truth-conditional semantics. Tyler Burge (b. 1946) similarly argues for externalism with the example of "arthritis in the knee". Nathan Salmon (b. 1951) focused on philosophy of language. The theories of linguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) are influential in discussions of language.

George Philip Lakoff and Mark L. Johnson presented insights in the field of cognitive linguistics by exploring the manner in which conceptual metaphors influence the process of understanding and the conveyance of "meaning" in general.^[185][186]

Philosophy of mathematics

Paul Benacerraf (1930–2025) has an influential argument against mathematical platonism. Hartry Field (b. 1946) argued for mathematical fictionalism in Science Without Numbers (1980). Penelope Maddy (b. 1950) defends realism.^[187] Edward Zalta (b. 1952) defends abstract object theory, and runs the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Joel David Hamkins (b. 1966) focuses on philosophy of mathematics.

Epistemology

Ernest Sosa (b. 1940) proposed virtue epistemology in "The Raft and the Pyramid" (1980).^[188] Michael Huemer (b. 1969) defends phenomenal conservatism. Alvin Goldman (1938–2024) developed a causal theory of knowledge. Susan Haack defends foundherentism. Barry Stroud (1935–2019) advanced, and criticized, transcendental arguments against skepticism.

The debate between internalism and externalism still exists. Huemer is an internalist. Goldman is an externalist known for developing a popular form of externalism called reliabilism. Most externalists reject the KK thesis, which has been disputed since the introduction of epistemic logic by Jaakko Hintikka (1929–2015) in 1962.

Philosophy of science

Colin Murray Turbayne (1916–2006) showed ancient dead metaphors continue to influence the philosophy of science.^{[189][190][191]} The Stanford School is one group of philosophers, who argued against the unity of science.^[192] Bas van Fraassen (b. 1941) argued for anti-realism. Tim Maudlin (b. 1958) does the philosophy of physics. Dennett defends Neo-Darwinism and natural selection in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), while Fodor criticizes natural selection in What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). Terrence L. Fine (1939–2021) wrote on probability.

Christian philosophy

Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932) is an analytic philosopher known for revitalizing interest in Christian philosophy and reformed epistemology. Plantinga was once described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God".^[193] Plantinga is best known for his seminal work God and Other Minds (1967) which defends the position that belief in the existence of God is properly basic. The Nature of Necessity (1974) contains his modal version of the ontological argument. The Evangelical Philosophical Society was founded in 1974 and the Society of Christian Philosophers was founded in 1978.

Plantinga is further known for his free will defense to the logical problem of evil. He also has a trilogy on epistemology, Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (2000). They contain the evolutionary argument against naturalism.^[s]

American Christian philosophy includes Peter van Inwagen, William Lane Craig, William Alston, Nicholas Wolterstorff. Peter Van Inwagen (b. 1942) is a Christian materialist notable for doubting the principle of sufficient reason. Van Inwagen also believes in free will and is known for the consequence argument, introducing the term incompatibilism about free will and determinism, to stand in contrast to compatibilism—the view that free will is compatible with determinism. William Alston (1921–2009) and Robert Merrihew Adams (1937–2024) defended divine command theory. William Lane Craig (b. 1949) defends the Kalam cosmological argument in the book (1979) of the same name.

Jc Beall (b. 1966) advocates logical pluralism and Christianity, writing Spandrels of Truth (2009) and The Contradictory Christ (2021).^[195] Eleonore Stump (b. 1947) is a Catholic Thomist.

Paul Edwards (1923–2004) criticized Heidegger, religion, and reincarnation, and published The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967).

Pittsburgh school

Several mid-20th century American analytic philosophers renewed the study of idealism.^[196][t] Influenced by Sellars, the American philosopher Nicholas Rescher (1928–2024) includes himself and his University of Pittsburgh colleagues John McDowell (b. 1942) and Robert Brandom (b. 1950) within a group of post-Hegelian "neo-idealists" known as the Pittsburgh School.^[196] In his Mind and World (1994), McDowell embraced an intricate form of "mitigated naturalism" derived from Kant's distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, while also circumventing the two extremes of "rampant Platonism" and "bald naturalism".^[196]

Quietism

Cora Diamond (b. 1937) attended Swansea University, where Wittgenstein student Rush Rhees had taught. Diamond and McDowell along with James F. Conant (b. 1958) and Alice Crary (b. 1967) lead an approach to reading Wittgenstein that is quietist.^{[200][201][202][203]}

Law

Noted American legal philosophers Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) and Richard Posner (b. 1939) 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.^[204] Dworkin is famous for his theory of law as integrity and legal interpretivism, especially as presented in his book Law's Empire.^[205][206] Joel Feinberg (1926–2004) also wrote on the law. Robert Paul Wolff (1933–2025) is an anarchist.

Wisdom

A renewed interest in the use of the ancient concept of philosophical wisdom to resolve contemporary problems in the realms of both ethics and metaphysics also emerged during this century among several philosophers in America. By pointing toward the significant role played by the virtues of compassion, empathy and understanding in the philosophical teachings of ancient Greece, these scholars argued that while the utilization of rational thought may in practice be necessary to formulate such solutions, it is also, by its very nature, not sufficient when utilized by itself. Included in this group are Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947)^[207] and Richard Clyde Taylor (1919–2003).^{[208][209][210]}

Aesthetics

Morris Weitz argued necessary and sufficient conditions will never exist for the concept 'art' because it is an "open concept". Arthur Danto (1924–2013) and George Dickie (1926–2020) argued for an "institutional definition of art". Dickie's student was Noël Carroll (b. 1947), who contributes to philosophy of film. There is also the historical definition, best exemplified by Jerrold Levinson (b. 1948). Kendall Walton (b. 1939) formulated a "make-believe" theory of representation influencing the fields of anti-realist ontology and aesthetics.^{[191][211][212][213]}

Lists

• List of Jewish American philosophers

Organizations

• American Philosophical Association
• American Philosophical Society
• American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy