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Does American Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Bruce Kuklick
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Extract

When I write about ‘American philosophy’ in this paper, I refer not to the practice of philosophizing in a certain geographic area during a certain time. Rather I mean a scholarly field defined by certain conventions, standard arguments, and major works. I hope primarily to show that that area of inquiry is befuddled. I also want to suggest, however, that it may be unhelpful to try to write about the practice of philosophizing in a certain geographic area—the continental United States—in anything like the way scholars now write about it.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 19: American Philosophy , March 1985 , pp. 177 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1985

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References

1 The substantive issues raised in this essay are treated at length in my Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, where extensive citations can be found. Pp. 301–302 of that work cites the series of methodological articles in which I have raised issues similar to the ones raised in this essay. Churchmen and Philosophers, as well as my The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, contains biographical and bibliographical references that will aid the reader in examining the works and lives of the thinkers I have mentioned in this essay.

2 See, for example, Conkin, Paul, Puritans and Pragmatrsts (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968)Google Scholar; White, Morton, Science and Sentiment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Flower, Elizabeth and Murphey, Murray G., A History of Philosophy in America, 2 vols (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1977)Google Scholar; and finally Murphey, 's explicit criticism of his own work, ‘Toward an Historicist History of American Philosophy’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 15 (1979), 3–18.Google Scholar

3 On this serious issue there is a substantial literature that begins with Heimert, Alan's Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Re-volution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

4 For Wendell see A Literary History of America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900)Google Scholar; and for Royce, , ‘William James and the Philosophy of Life’, in William James and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1911)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Miller, 's most important works in this connection are his The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965)Google Scholar, and his anthology American Thought: Civil War to World War 1 (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1956)Google Scholar. Matthiessen, 's fame rests on American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941)Google Scholar. White's and Murphey's synthetic works are cited above. Parrington wrote Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927–1930)Google Scholar; Van Wyck Brooks, , most prominently, The Flowering of New England 1815–1865 (New York: E. P. Duttonand Co., 1936)Google Scholar; Curti, , The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943).Google Scholar

5 Russell, , Autobiography, Vol. 1 (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1967), 326.Google Scholar