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CANONIZING DEWEY: NATURALISM, LOGICAL EMPIRICISM, AND THE IDEA OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

ANDREW JEWETT
ANDREW JEWETT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: ajewett@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University's John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second-generation Columbia naturalists (John Herman Randall Jr, Herbert W. Schneider, Irwin Edman, Horace L. Friess, and James Gutmann) and their students who later joined the department (Charles Frankel, Joseph L. Blau, Albert Hofstadter, and Justus Buchler) reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel's attempt to build an alliance with the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar's primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either “analytic” or “Continental” eclipsed the Columbia philosophers’ normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of “American philosophy” that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 2011 , pp. 91 - 125
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Randall, John Herman Jr, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” in Johnson, F. Ernest, ed., Wellsprings of the American Spirit (New York, 1948), 120–21, 129Google Scholar; idem, review of Cohen, American Thought, Jewish Social Studies 17 (1955), 78; idem, “John Dewey, 1859–1952,” Journal of Philosophy 50 (1953), 11.

2 Professionalization dynamics feature prominently in Kuklick, Bruce, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven, 1977)Google Scholar; Wilson, Daniel J., Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860–1930 (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; and McCumber, John, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL, 2001)Google Scholar.

3 Kuklick covers the latter in “Philosophy at Yale in the Century after Darwin,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 21 (2004), 313–36; and sketches Columbia naturalism in A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York, 2001), 190–96. Also see Shea, William M., The Naturalists and the Supernatural (Macon, GA, 1984)Google Scholar; Ryder, John, ed., American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, NY, 1994)Google Scholar; Tejera, Victorino, American Modern, the Path Not Taken: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and Intellectual History in Classic American Philosophy (Lanham, MD, 1996)Google Scholar; and Anton, John P., American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy (Amherst, NY, 2005)Google Scholar. Gutmann taught part-time at Columbia until 1936, when he finally received his PhD: Randall, John Herman Jr, “The Department of Philosophy,” in Barzun, Jacques, ed., A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University (New York, 1957), 136Google Scholar.

4 McGreevy, John T., Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), 175Google Scholar.

5 Another Austrian, Herbert Feigl, had already landed at the University of Iowa in 1930. Carnap arrived at the University of Chicago in 1936, while Reichenbach found a post at UCLA in 1938. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 233.

6 On the constructed nature of the analytic–Continental divide, see Simon Critchley's introduction to A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Malden, MA, 1998), 3–6.

7 David A. Hollinger describes this phenomenon in “Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in idem, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, 1996), 17–41.

8 Corliss Lamont to Randall, 10 April 1934, “Lamont, Corliss,” Box 2, John Herman Randall Jr papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Randall papers”).

9 Randall, John Herman and Buchler, Justus, Philosophy: An Introduction (New York, 1942), 291Google Scholar, original emphasis.

10 Randall, who hoped to direct what he saw as individuals’ innate religious impulses toward human ideals, told Reinhold Niebuhr that he was an atheist but “no infidel.” Randall to Niebuhr, 2 Dec. 1942, “Niebuhr, Reinhold,” Box 2, Randall papers.

11 Meyer, Donald H., “Secular Transcendence: The American Religious Humanists,” American Quarterly 34 (1982), 524–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephen P. Weldon, “The Humanist Enterprise from John Dewey to Carl Sagan: A Study of Science and Religion in American Culture,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1997, 59–98.

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18 Friess, Horace L., “The Sixth International Congress of Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 23 (1926), 636CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Numerous commentators have noted Dewey's relentless campaign against empiricism, e.g. Ryan, Alan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995), 126Google Scholar.

20 Dewey, John, “William James as Empiricist” (1942), Later Works, 15: 14Google Scholar. All Dewey citations refer to The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953: The Electronic Edition.

21 See especially Randall's The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston, 1926) and Our Changing Civilization: How Science and the Machine are Reconstructing Modern Life (New York, 1929).

22 Examples of the former tendency include Otto, Max C., Things and Ideals (New York, 1924)Google Scholar and Natural Laws and Human Hopes (New York, 1926); Roy Wood Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago, 1922); Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926)Google Scholar; Burtt, E. A., The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (New York, 1925)Google Scholar; and Drake, Durant, Mind and Its Place in Nature (New York, 1925)Google Scholar.

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24 Randall to John J. Coss, 28 Feb. 1929, “Randall, John Herman, Jr.,” Box 2, Randall papers.

25 Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 116. Woodbridge also inspired Dewey to clarify and articulate his metaphysical views: Westbrook, John Dewey, 321. Another mentor to the second-generation naturalists was John J. Coss, the department's executive officer. Coss, who built up the famed Contemporary Civilization course and played a key role in hiring decisions, also negotiated with publishers on behalf of Columbia's young philosophers. W. E. Spaulding to Coss, 27 Oct. 1924, and Coss to Spaulding, 1 Dec. 1925, “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers.

26 Woodbridge, Frederick J. E., Nature and Mind (New York, 1937)Google Scholar; idem, An Essay on Nature (New York, 1940). A critical study is Jones, William Frank, Nature and Natural Science: The Philosophy of Frederick J. E. Woodbridge (Buffalo, 1983)Google Scholar. Cotkin emphasizes Santayana's influence on Edman in “Middle-Ground Pragmatists,” 293–6.

27 Woodbridge to Randall, 22 April 1937, “Woodbridge, Frederick J.E.,” Box 3, Randall papers.

28 Friess to Randall, 15 Nov. 1924, “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers.

29 Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind.

30 Radest, Howard, Felix Adler: An Ethical Culture (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

31 Friess to Randall, 22 Feb. 1925 (1 March addition), “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers. The final product of Friess's effort was the posthumous Felix Adler and Ethical Culture: Memories and Studies (New York, 1981), which includes some biographical information, as do Gutmann's foreword to the book and Friess's “The Affirmation of Man,” in Salo W. Baron, Ernest Nagel, and Koppel S. Pinson, eds., Freedom and Reason: Studies in Philosophy and Jewish Culture in Memory of Morris Raphael Cohen (Glencoe, IL, 1951), 128–41.

32 See the series of 1982 letters in “Black, Algernon D.,” Box 1, James Gutmann papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Gutmann papers”). Adler taught at Columbia but busied himself little with the department's affairs: Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 120–22.

33 Schneider to Dwight C. Miner, 17 Sept. 1952, “Corres. from Schneider,” Box 1, Herbert W. Schneider papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Schneider papers”); Horace L. Friess, “The Department of Religion,” in Barzun, ed., A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, 146–67.

34 Examples include Randall, and Randall, John Herman Sr, Religion and the Modern World (New York, 1929)Google Scholar; Friess, Horace L. and Schneider, Herbert W., Religion in Various Cultures (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; Edman, Irwin, The Mind of Paul (New York, 1935)Google Scholar; and Schneider, Herbert Wallace, Meditations in Season on the Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York, 1938)Google Scholar.

35 Lee H. Ball to Randall, 19 Nov. 1931, “Correspondence, 1930–1939,” Box 4, Randall papers. Coss had studied at Union as well: Randall, “Towards a Functional Naturalism,” in Smith, John E., ed., Contemporary American Philosophy (New York, 1970), 56Google Scholar.

36 E.g. Schneider to Randall, 30 July 1942, “Schneider, Herbert W.,” Box 2, Randall papers; Sterling P. Lamprecht to Gutmann, 25 May 1943, “Lamprecht, Sterling P.,” Box 1, Gutmann papers. Lamprecht was an exiled member of the second generation; he studied with the others at Columbia but taught at the University of Illinois and later Amherst. For his version of naturalism, see Empiricism and Natural Knowledge (Berkeley, 1940).

37 Schneider to Randall, 24 Feb. 1937, “Schneider, Herbert W.,” Box 2, Randall papers; W. E. Hocking to Randall, 19 April 1944, “Hocking, William Ernest,” ibid.

38 Dorrien, Gary, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY, 2003), 494Google Scholar; Ernest Nagel, transcript of interview with Kenneth W. Duckett, 10 Oct. 1966, “Arranged Correspondence. Miscellaneous (2),” Box 2, Ernest Nagel papers, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter “Duckett transcript,” “Nagel papers”).

39 On the centrality of science to America's early professional philosophers see Wilson, Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy.

40 This and the following paragraph represent my reading of the material in Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 95–224. It is revealing that Harvard's W. V. O. Quine, who carried many features of logical empiricism into the postwar era, felt like a fish out of water at Harvard in the 1930s. His colleagues disdained his highly technical approach. Isaac, Joel, “W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States,” MIH 2 (2005), 205–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Nerlich, Brigitte, “The 1930s—At the Birth of a Pragmatic Conception of Language,” Historiographica Linguistica 22 (1995), 311–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Randall described empiricism as an “identification of knowledge with vision.” This “spectator theory” failed utterly to account for modern science, in Randall's view: “It is difficult to ‘see’ a scientific hypothesis or theory, or a framework of measurement,” despite the indispensability of these conceptual objects. Randall found in empiricism no place for the “use of intellectual tools,” the “getting from one place in experience to another,” typical of scientific practice. Randall to Ewing P. Shahan, 17 April 1942, “Correspondence, 1940–1949,” Box 4, Randall papers.

42 Quoted in Friess, “The Sixth International Congress,” 621.

43 Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 134–7. The department employed an informal hiring policy, relying heavily on personal vouchsafes and often giving outside prospects trial runs, though it favored its own students. E.g. John J. Coss to Randall, 28 Feb. 1934, “Coss, John J.,” Box 1, Randall papers. It is difficult to find details about Nagel's life. Characteristically, his Festschrift offers neither a biographical essay nor a bibliography: Morgenbesser, Sidney, Suppes, Patrick, and White, Morton, eds., Philosophy, Science, and Method (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

44 Edman, Irwin, “The College: A Memoir of Forty Years,” in Miner, Dwight C., ed., A History of Columbia College on Morningside (New York, 1954), 5–7Google Scholar; Schneider to Dwight C. Miner, 17 Sept. 1952, “Corres. from Schneider,” Box 1, Schneider papers.

45 Box 27 of the Nagel papers contains dozens of speeches on topics such as “Philosophy as a Social Science,” “Logic and the Good Life,” and “Science and Contemporary World Views.” See also Nagel, Ernest and Newman, James R., Gödel's Proof (New York, 1958)Google Scholar. Nagel and Cohen's book is An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (New York, 1934).

46 Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 131–3, 136. On the centrality of the history of ideas to the department's self-conception, see Woodbridge to Randall, 5 April 1940, “Woodbridge, Frederick J.E.,” Box 3, Randall papers; and Nagel to Frank D. Fackenthal, 22 April 1944, “Nagel, Ernest,” Box 1, Nagel papers. Lowen, Rebecca S., Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley, 1997), esp. 155Google Scholar, notes the prevalence of the ideal of “balance” in interwar departments.

47 Reisch, George A., How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (New York, 2005), 27–56, 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other helpful sources include Hacohen, Malachi, Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Uebel, Thomas, “Political Philosophy of Science in Logical Empiricism: The Left Vienna Circle,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 36 (2005), 754–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hardcastle, Gary and Richardson, Alan, eds., Logical Empiricism in North America (Minneapolis, 2003)Google Scholar; Richardson, Alan and Uebel, Thomas, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the symposium on Reisch's book in Science & Education 18 (2009), 157–220.

48 Carus, A. W., Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment (New York, 2007), 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Indeed, he continued, such obscurantism “helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.” Dewey, John, Freedom and Culture (1939), Later Works, 13: 172Google Scholar.

50 Galison, Peter, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus 127 (1998), 65Google Scholar.

51 Edman, “The Vision of Naturalism,” 204.

52 Dewey told Charles W. Morris in 1939, “Of course I agree that ‘metaphysical’ statements in the sense of non- or anti-empirical are unverifiable. But I think the attempt to dismiss them entirely at one swoop by calling them ‘meaningless’ is a serious tactical mistake.” Quoted in Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 95.

53 Cavell, Stanley and Sesonske, Alexander, “Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951), 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Randall to James Putnam, 25 May 1944, Randall papers, Box 4, folder “Correspondence, 1940–1949.”

55 To the logical empiricists, Peter Galison has written, metaphysics meant “not some limited concept, but the alive, well, and dangerous movements for Godliness, Volk, mysticism, and Deutschtum.” Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” 65.

56 Nagel, Ernest, “Some Theses in the Philosophy of Logic,” Philosophy of Science 5 (1938), 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Dewey, John, The Quest for Certainty (1929), Later Works, 4: 239Google Scholar.

58 E.g. Dewey, John, The Theory of Valuation (1939), Later Works, 13: 249Google Scholar.

59 Bannister, Robert C., Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark C., Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)Google Scholar.

60 Secondary accounts include Purcell, Edward A. Jr, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and The Problem of Value (Lexington, KY, 1973)Google Scholar; David A. Hollinger, “Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States during and after World War II,” in idem, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, 155–74; and Gilbert, James, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago, 1997), 63–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Within philosophy, the Yale idealist Wilmon H. Sheldon took the offensive: “Critique of Naturalism,” Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945), 253–70. Nagel, Ernest, Dewey, John, and Hook, Sidney, “Are Naturalists Materialists?” Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945), 515–30, 530Google Scholar, retorted that the real threat to human values was Sheldon's mind–body dualism. Such a view, they wrote, “deprives human choice of effective status, opens the door wide to irresponsible intuitions, and dehumanizes the control of nature and society” by insulating values from scientific criticism. Cf. Lewis, C. I., “Logical Positivism and Pragmatism” (1941), in Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, ed. Goheen, John D. and Mothershead, John L. Jr (Stanford, 1970), 107–8Google Scholar.

61 Weidlich, Thom, Appointment Denied: The Inquisition of Bertrand Russell (Amherst, NY, 2000)Google Scholar.

62 Blumberg, Albert E. and Feigl, Herbert, “Logical Positivism,” Journal of Philosophy 28 (1931), 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carnap, Rudolf, The Unity of Science (London, 1934)Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, 1936)Google Scholar.

63 Urban, Wilbur M., “Value Propositions and Verifiability,” Journal of Philosophy 34 (1937), 591CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Quine identified Carnap with the movement in his 1934 lecture series and at the Harvard Tercentenary: Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” 229. Patterns of emigration further reinforced this focus on Carnap; the alternative versions of logical empiricism crafted by Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick, who did not make it to the United States, barely registered among American philosophers. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 13, 15–16. Reisch addresses Carnap's “neutralist activism” at 47–53.

65 Carnap, comment on Morris, Charles W., “Empiricism, Religion, and Democracy,” in Bryson, Lyman and Finkelstein, Louis, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion: Second Symposium (New York, 1942), 238Google Scholar.

66 Carnap, Rudolf, “Logic,” in Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA, 1937), 108, 117–18Google Scholar.

67 Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” esp. 223. Less fortunate was Charles L. Stevenson, who classed ethical statements with oratory and declared that their analysis fell outside the realm of philosophy. His Yale colleagues disagreed. When Stevenson came up for tenure, they unanimously convicted him of a “lack of thorough grounding in philosophy” and “a grave deficiency of temper.” The question of logical empiricism's validity remained open at Yale, but Stevenson himself was off to Michigan. “Summary of the Action Taken with Regard to the Status of Assistant Professor Charles L. Stevenson,” 7 March 1945, “Hendel, Charles W., 1943–1945,” Box 17, Series I, Brand Blanshard papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. A slightly different interpretation of these events appears in Kuklick, “Philosophy at Yale,” 324–5.

68 Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” 227. Early in his career, Quine may have felt the need to prove his commitment to social efficacy; see his popular articles “Relations and Reason,” Technology Review 41 (1939), 299–301, 324–7; and “Russell's Paradox and Others,” Technology Review 44 (1941), 16–17. Characteristically, however, he still confined himself to the technical needs of private citizens rather than wider aspects of public policy.

69 Morris, Charles W., “Some Aspects of Recent American Scientific Philosophy,” Erkenntnis 5 (1935), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Reisch, George A., “Doomed in Advance to Defeat? John Dewey on Logical Empiricism, Reductionism, and Values,” in Nemeth, Elisabeth and Roudet, Nicolas, eds., Paris-Wien: Enzyklopädien im Vergleich (New York, 2005), 244Google Scholar; Morris, Charles W., “The Unity of Science Movement and the United States,” Synthese 3 (1938), 27–8Google Scholar.

71 Morris, “The Unity of Science Movement,” 28. Also see “Pragmatism and the Crisis of Democracy,” Public Policy Pamphlet No. 12 (Chicago, 1934). Morris's books are Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago, 1938) and Paths of Life: Preface to a World Religion (New York, 1942). On Neurath's response see Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 47. Despite his broad political ambitions, Neurath objected to philosophers’ use of such terms as “good,” “justice,” and even “interests.” Reisch, George A., “Economist, Epistemologist . . . and Censor? On Otto Neurath's Index Verborum Prohibitorum,” Perspectives on Science 5 (1997), 474–6Google Scholar.

72 I have reconstructed Nagel's itinerary from letters in Leonora Rosenfeld, Portrait of a Philosopher: Morris R. Cohen in Life and Letters (New York, 1948), 399–401.

73 Nagel, Ernest, “The Fight for Clarity: Logical Empiricism,” American Scholar 8 (1939), 47Google Scholar.

74 Joseph [Garvin?] to Randall, 18 June 1939, “Correspondence, 1930–1939,” Box 4, Randall papers. Both Woodbridge and Dewey took this approach: Randall, “Towards a Functional Naturalism,” 71; Duckett transcript.

75 Dewey, The Theory of Valuation, 410; Westbrook, John Dewey, 402–12. Dewey added the footnote after Carnap and Neurath protested that they rejected Ayer's strict version of noncognitivism. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 91–3.

76 Dewey, John, “William James as Empiricist” (1942), Later Works, 15: 14Google Scholar.

77 Randall, John Herman Jr, “Dewey's Interpretation of the History of Philosophy,” in Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (La Salle, IL, 1939), 80Google Scholar.

78 Randall, John Herman Jr, The Making of the Modern Mind, Revised Edition (Boston, 1940), 612, 614–15Google Scholar.

79 Randall, “John Dewey,” 12.

80 Outline of The Impact of the War on the American Mind, “Curti, Merle,” Box 1, Randall papers.

81 Edman, Irwin, “The First Quarter of 1934 in the U.S.A.,” Aryan Path 5 (1934), 477Google Scholar.

82 Irwin Edman, “The Uses of Philosophy” (1937), in Frankel, ed., The Uses of Philosophy, 25.

83 Edman, Irwin, Four Ways of Philosophy (New York, 1937), 325Google Scholar.

84 Edman, Irwin, “Lyric and Analytic Elements in Naturalistic Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 38 (1941), 562, 564, 567CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Edman, Irwin, “The Private Thinker and the Public World,” Journal of Philosophy 43 (1946), 617, 623, 627CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Edman, see his “The College”; Frankel, Charles, “Edman, Irwin,” Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Five (New York, 1977), 198–9Google Scholar; and Shields, Allan, “The Aesthetics of Irwin Edman (1896–1954),” Journal of Aesthetic Education 14 (1980), 23–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Schneider, Herbert W., Science and Social Progress: A Philosophical Introduction to Moral Science (Lancaster, PA, 1920)Google Scholar.

87 Schneider, Herbert W., review of Schlick, Problems of Ethics, Journal of Philosophy 36 (1939), 633–4Google Scholar. See also Schneider, Herbert W., “Moral Obligation,” Ethics 50 (1939), 45–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For biographical information see Walton, Craig and Anton, John P., “Herbert Wallace Schneider: A Biographical Sketch,” in Walton and Anton, eds., Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts: Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider (Athens, OH, 1974), xi–xxiiGoogle Scholar.

88 Schneider, Herbert W., “Philosophic Thought in France and the United States,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11 (1951), 382CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 von Rintelen, Fritz-Joachim, “Positivism, Humanitarianism, and Humanity,” trans. Schneider, Herbert W., Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11 (1951), 413CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both quotes are from Schneider's introduction to the text.

90 Nagel, Ernest, “The Eighth International Congress of Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 31 (1934), 591–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nagel also lauded Morris's approach in his review of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Journal of Philosophy 35 (1938), 691; and in a letter of 11 Nov. 1938 to Morris, “International Institute for the Unity of Science,” Box 1, Nagel papers.

91 Nagel, Ernest, “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. I,” Journal of Philosophy 33 (1936), 6, 9Google Scholar.

92 Nagel took Moritz Schlick to task for failing to make this move. Nagel, Ernest, “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. II,” Journal of Philosophy 33 (1936), 32Google Scholar. See also idem, “Charles Peirce's Guesses at the Riddle,” Journal of Philosophy 30 (1933), esp. 376. He argued several times that the logical empiricists had only just arrived at positions established by Peirce and taken for granted by American thinkers. In 1948, however, Nagel allowed that Carnap had finally come abreast of “some of the American realists in 1912.” Review of Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, Journal of Philosophy 45 (1948), 471.

93 Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals II,” 49.

94 Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals I,” 6–7 (italics removed).

95 Nagel, “The Fight for Clarity,” 58–9.

96 Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals II,” 49.

97 Nagel, Ernest, “Charles S. Peirce, Pioneer of Modern Empiricism,” Philosophy of Science 7 (1940), 77–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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99 Nagel, Ernest, “Naturalism Reconsidered,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 28 (1954–5), 7, 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Woodbridge, Nature and Mind, 258; Edman, Four Ways of Philosophy, 229; and Randall, “Dewey's Interpretation,” 82. Buchler, Justus, Charles Peirce's Empiricism (New York, 1936), 261Google Scholar, dubbed this view “public empiricism.”

100 Nagel, “Impressions and Appraisals I,” 7. To broad audiences, in fact—in whose minds Nagel sought to establish the superiority of the “antimetaphysical empirical philosophies” (“Cambridge analytic philosophy, logical positivism, and pragmatism”) over unscientific competitors such as Marxism, rather than touting the benefits of Columbia's particular version—he described logical empiricism as having already “fuse[d] the use of refined logical techniques successfully with a biological, social approach.” Ernest Nagel, “On the Philosophical Battlefront,” Partisan Review 15 (1948), 711; idem, “The Fight for Clarity,” 50. See also idem, “Recent Philosophies of Science,” 315–316. By contrast, Nagel rejected Wittgenstein's “self-denying” reduction of philosophy to “the reinstatement of the unsophistication of the ‘plain man.’” Idem, “Impressions and Appraisals I,” 22.

101 Nagel directed much of this criticism toward Neurath, whose writings he found sloppy. Nagel to Charles W. Morris, 11 Nov. 1938, “International Institute for the Unity of Science,” Box 1, Nagel papers; Nagel to Arthur Bentley, 2 Dec. 1944, “Bentley, Arthur,” Box 1, Nagel papers.

102 Nagel to Randall, 31 July 1942, “Correspondence, 1940–1949,” Box 4, Randall papers.

103 Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 243–58; Isaac, “W. V. Quine,” 225–6.

104 Nagel, Ernest, “Naturalism Reconsidered,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 28 (1954–5), 7, 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 Putnam, Hilary, “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed From Within,” Daedalus 126 (1997), 176, original emphasisGoogle Scholar. The standard image has found its strongest formulation in McCumber's Time in the Ditch.

106 Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 137.

107 Randall, John Herman, Nature and Historical Experience: Essays in Naturalism and in the Theory of History (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; Schneider, Herbert W., “Metaphysical Vision,” Philosophical Review 58 (1949), 399–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Three Dimensions of Public Morality (Bloomington, IN, 1956); idem, Morals for Mankind (Columbia, MO, 1960); idem, Ways of Being: Elements of Analytic Ontology (New York, 1962). On these writings see Singer, Beth J., “Metaphysics without Mirrors,” in Rockmore, Tom and Singer, Beth J., eds., Antifoundationalism Old and New (Philadelphia, 1992), 189–208Google Scholar; Tejera, American Modern, 176–94; and Anton, American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy, 163–222. Harvard's C. I. Lewis illustrates the wider trend; his postwar books include An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, IL, 1946), The Ground and Nature of the Right (New York, 1955), and Our Social Inheritance (Bloomington, IN, 1957).

108 Buchler and Hofstadter, attracted to logical empiricism during their student days in the late 1930s, soon questioned its “dread of imprecision” and took up metaphysics and aesthetics respectively. Justus Buchler, review of Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Nation 172 (1951), 620. Representative postwar writings include Buchler, Justus, Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; and Hofstadter, Albert, Truth and Art (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. Frankel and Blau wrote on political and social ethics, stressing the inseparability of value judgments from their human contexts: e.g., Frankel, Charles, “Empiricism and Moral Imperatives,” Journal of Philosophy 50 (23 April 1953), 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Blau, Joseph L., ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis, 1954)Google Scholar.

109 Lionel Trilling to Gutmann, 22 March 1956, “Trilling, Lionel,” Box 1, Gutmann papers; Edman, “The College,” 10; Richard Hofstadter to Randall, 16 Jan. 1954, “Hofstadter, Richard,” Box 2, Randall papers; Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, 66. Cotkin notes this parallel with postwar liberals in “Middle-Ground Pragmatists,” 284.

110 Randall, Our Changing Civilization, 354. On the “postcapitalist” sensibility of that era, see Brick, Howard, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY, 2006)Google Scholar.

111 Friess, “The Department of Religion”; Glock, Charles Y., “Remembrances of Things Past: SSSR's Formative Years,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39 (2000), 425CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Programmatic statements include Schneider, Herbert W., “Religion as a University Concern,” Columbia University Quarterly 23 (1931), 93–102Google Scholar; and Friess, Horace L., “The Importance of Religion,” Kenyon Review 8 (1946), 617–32Google Scholar. Columbia's naturalists also worked closely with the faculty at Union Theological Seminary. For example, Randall co-taught for years with Paul Tillich and also socialized and shared students with Reinhold Niebuhr. Randall, “The Department of Philosophy,” 140; Niebuhr to Mercedes Randall, 5 Nov. 1965, “Niebuhr, Reinhold,” Box 2, Randall papers.

112 Key texts include Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind; idem, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padova, 1961); idem, The Career of Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York, 1962–5); Schneider, Herbert W., The Puritan Mind (New York, 1930)Google Scholar; and Nagel, Ernest, “‘Impossible Numbers’: A Chapter in the History of Logic,” in Studies in the History of Ideas, vol. 3 (New York, 1935), 429–74Google Scholar. On Randall's role in the history of science, see Reingold, Nathan, Science, American Style (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 369Google Scholar. Schneider helped launch the Journal of the History of Philosophy: Walton and Anton, “Herbert Wallace Schneider,” xix. On American studies see Gleason, Philip, “World War II and the Development of American Studies,” American Quarterly 36 (1984), 343–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Randall, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” 118. Randall also penned Aristotle (New York, 1960) and Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason (New York, 1970); translated Ernst Cassirer's Rousseau, Kant, Goethe (Princeton, 1945) with Gutmann and Paul Oskar Kristeller; and co-edited, with Cassirer and Kristeller, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1963). Other Columbia figures translated and anthologized additional Western writers: Schleiermacher's Sololiquies, trans. Horace L. Friess (Chicago, 1926); The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman (New York, 1928); Schelling, Friedrich, Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. Gutmann, James (La Salle, IL, 1936)Google Scholar; Rousseau: The Social Contract, ed. Charles Frankel (New York, 1947); Schneider, Herbert W., ed., Adam Smith's Moral and Political Philosophy (New York, 1948)Google Scholar; Alighieri, Dante, On World Government, or De Monarchia, trans. Schneider, Herbert W. (New York, 1949)Google Scholar; Edman, Irwin, ed., The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York, 1950)Google Scholar; and Schneider, Herbert W., Ross, Ralph, and Waldman, Theodore, eds., Thomas Hobbes in His Time (Minneapolis, 1974)Google Scholar.

114 Schneider, Herbert W., Sources of Contemporary Philosophical Realism in America (Indianapolis, 1964), ixGoogle Scholar.

115 Frankel, Charles, The Golden Age of American Philosophy (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

116 In addition to the texts cited below, see Woodbridge to Randall, 31 Jan. 1932, “Woodbridge, Frederick J.E.,” Box 3, Randall papers. The sociologist Neil Gross explores the identification of pragmatism with democracy in “Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher: Status, Self-Concept, and Intellectual Choice,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002), 52–76.

117 Schneider, Herbert W., A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1946), vii–viiiGoogle Scholar.

118 Randall, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” 122, 124.

119 Friess to Randall, 22 Feb. 1925, “Correspondence, 1920–1929,” Box 4, Randall papers (underlining removed).

120 E.g. Hofstadter, Albert, Locke and Scepticism (New York, 1935), 133–4Google Scholar.

121 Edman, Four Ways of Philosophy, 318.

122 E.g., Ratner, Sidney et al. , The Philosopher of the Common Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey to Celebrate His Eightieth Birthday (New York, 1940)Google Scholar, Edman, Irwin, Fountainheads of Freedom: The Growth of the Democratic Idea (New York, 1941)Google Scholar; Hook, Sidney, ed., John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom (New York, 1950)Google Scholar.

123 Edman, Irwin, John Dewey: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Indianapolis, 1955)Google Scholar.

124 Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 511–71.

125 Schneider, Herbert W., A History of American Philosophy, 2nd edn (New York, 1963), xiii, 477Google Scholar. By this time, Schneider had retired from Columbia and moved to California, where he helped to build up the Claremont Graduate Center. Walton and Anton, “Herbert Wallace Schneider,” xix.

126 Herbert W. Schneider, “The American Establishment, the Civilizing Arts, and Philosophy,” in Walton and Anton, eds., Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts, 439.

127 Randall, “The Spirit of American Philosophy,” 119–20, 128. Cf. “The Department of Philosophy,” 103.

128 Joseph L. Blau, “Recent Philosophic Importations,” in Baron, Nagel, and Pinson, eds., Freedom and Reason, 87–96. See also idem, Men and Movements in American Philosophy (New York, 1952).

129 Nagel noted that the American temper also took such names as “functional realism” and “process philosophy.” Nagel, Ernest, “Philosophy and the American Temper” (1947), reprinted in Sovereign Reason (Glencoe, IL, 1954), 51–3, 55, 57Google Scholar. The clearest statement of Nagel's postwar political stance is his Dewey Lecture, Liberalism and Intelligence (Bennington, VT, 1957).

130 A full account of the formation of the American philosophical canon would also include such landmark texts as Fisch, Max H., ed., Classic American Philosophers (New York, 1951)Google Scholar and Smith, John E., The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York, 1963)Google Scholar.

131 Of course, not all adherents of the philosophical schools mentioned have aligned them with American democracy. But the strategy has proved widely attractive.

132 Defenders of the canon often join Randall in explicitly differentiating “American philosophy” from “philosophy in America.” The first sentence of Armen Marsoobian and John Ryder's introduction to The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy (Malden, MA, 2004) draws this distinction. Cheryl Misak takes a more ecumenical approach in The Oxford Guide to American Philosophy (New York, 2008).

133 Gutmann to the Provisional Committee for the Observation of John Dewey's Centenary, 10 July 1958, “Dewey Centenary Committee,” Box 35, Randall papers.

134 “John Dewey Fete Set,” New York Times, 18 Oct. 1959, 134; “Dr. Dewey, 90 Oct. 20, To Be Widely Feted,” New York Times, 7 Sept. 1949.

135 Quoted in Martin, Jay, The Education of John Dewey (New York, 2002), 477Google Scholar; “Columbia Hails John Dewey,” New York Times, 21 Oct. 1959, 28.

136 Gutmann to the Provisional Committee, 10 July 1958.