Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This book is a guide to American philosophy, not to philosophy in America. The distinction is an important one. Beginning roughly after the end of the Second World War, as John McDermott points out in the Epilogue to this book, American philosophers turned to various European philosophical movements then current for their inspiration. For most of the latter half of the twentieth century philosophy in America concerned itself primarily with the issues and developments in logical and linguistic analysis that stemmed from the influence of the Vienna Circle and from the work of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the UK. To a lesser extent, some philosophers in America turned their attention to the work in phenomenology and existentialism that had its primary home in Germany and France. But American philosophy, with which all of the chapters in this book deal, is something else. Above all, it means the philosophical studies undertaken by what are often called the “classical American philosophers” of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the period of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Alfred North Whitehead, and many others; this was the period during which philosophical pragmatism was born, first in the work of Peirce, and soon after to be developed in novel directions by James and Dewey. ... log in or subscribe to read full text