Concentrating on the era when American academic philosophy was nearly equated with Harvard, the ideas, lives, and social milieu of Pierce, James, Royce, Whitehead, and others are critically analyzed.

Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hoped that the profession of philosophy would collapse, that philosophy’s style of reasoning would be transformed, and that analytic philosophy would be overturned. This essay looks at the 40 years since the book’s publication, and argues that the discipline has become more professionalized, that its style of reasoning is the same, and that analysis still flourishes.

Here at last is an American counterpart to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. The eminent historian Bruce Kuklick tells the fascinating story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the USA, in the context of the intellectual and social changes of the times. Kuklick sketches the genesis of these intellectual practices in New England Calvinism and the writing of Jonathan Edwards. He discusses theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the origins of collegiate philosophy in the early part (...) of the nineteenth century. We see the development of secular preconceptions and the emergence, after Darwin's writings of the mid-late nineteenth century, of forms of thought hostile to religion. Philosophy is situated in a variety of cultural contexts - the ministry, the growing system of higher learning, the conflict between philosophers and theologians and between amateur and professional thinkers, the suspicion of European ideas, and worries about the relevance of philosophy to public and political life. Kuklick's narrative portrays such great thinkers as Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. Quine, and Richard Rorty, and assesses their contributions to philosophy. He brings us right up to date with the first historical treatment of the period after pragmatism, and the fragmentation of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Kuklick steers a controversial course between the divergent views that historians and philosophers take of the significance of philosophy in recent years. Anyone interested in American intellectual history, or in how philosophy got where it is today, will enjoy this book. (shrink)

Ranging from Joseph Bellamy to Hilary Putnam, and from early New England Divinity Schools to contemporary university philosophy departments, historian Bruce Kuklick recounts the story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the United States. Readers will explore the thought of early American philosphers such as Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon and will see how the political ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson influenced philosophy in colonial America. Kuklick discusses The Transcendental Club (members Henry David Thoreau, Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson) and describes the rise of pragmatism centered on Metaphysical Club of Cambridge (and members William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Peirce). He examines the profound impact Darwinism had on American philosophy and looks at Idealists such as the Kantian Josiah Royce and the Hegelian John Dewey. The book shows how, in the twentieth century, the Nazi conquest of Europe unleashed a flood of European intellectuals onto these shores, including such major thinkers as Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, Rudolph Carnap, and Alfred Tarski. Finally, Kuklick examines the contributions of such contemporary philosophers as Sidney Hook and Willard Quine and such books as John Rawl's A Theory of Justice and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. Kuklick pulls no punches in portraying the state of American philosophy today and its contested role in the intellectual life of the nation and the world. The range of philosophical thought in our nation's history has been great, from Edwards's Religious Affections to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Bruce Kuklick has captured it all in a book that blends intricate details with sweeping vision. (shrink)

At a time when almost all African American college students attended black colleges, philosopher William Fontaine was the only black member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty—and quite possibly the only black member of any faculty in the Ivy League. Little is known about Fontaine, but his predicament was common to African American professionals and intellectuals at a critical time in the history of civil rights and race relations in the United States. Black Philosopher, White Academy is at once a (...) biographical sketch of a man caught up in the issues and the dilemmas of race in the middle of the last century; a portrait of a salient aspect of academic life then; and an intellectual history of a period in African American life and letters, the discipline of philosophy, and the American academy. It is also a meditation on the sources available to a practicing historian and, frustratingly, the sources that are not. Bruce Kuklick stays close to the slim packet of evidence left on Fontaine's life and career but also strains against its limitations to extract the largest possible insights into the life of the elusive Fontaine. (shrink)

Writing about the intellectual development of a philosopher is a delicate business. My own endeavor to reinterpret the influence of Hegel on Dewey troubles some scholars because, they believe, I make Dewey seem less original.1 But if, like Dewey, we overcome Cartesian dualism, placing the development of the self firmly within a complex matrix of social processes, we are forced to reexamine, without necessarily surrendering, the notion of individual originality, or what Neil Gross calls “discourse[s] of creative genius.”2 To use (...) a mundane example, I can recall several conversations with Dewey scholars about his dislike for his home state of Vermont, all of which revolved around personal reasons he may.. (shrink)

: This comment on Campbell argues that a good book could be made better if more critical judgment was displayed. Attempts to recover the complete past must be abandoned, and especially in the history of ideas, evaluative judgments about the worth of ideas must be made and the presuppositions of thought must be explored.

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Why is someone enduringly prized as a philosopher? To answer this question, this historical case study examines the intersecting careers of John Rawls and R. M. Hare. It looks at their writings, a complex chain of disagreements, the argumentative dimension. The essay moreover explores the clash of differing temperaments. Finally, themes in addition to ratiocination and personality are factored in: the leanings of the institutions that control access to intellectual endeavor; the public square—politics widely conceived—into which the two men were (...) thrown; and the cultural rivalry between England and America after World War Two. (shrink)

This is an extremely frustrating study. At a basic level it is a competent intellectual biography of Rorty. The writing in the biographical parts of the book is fluent and clear. The historical research in the papers of Rorty and his family is impressive. Although Gross is a sociologist, he has used to his advantage interviews with many people, including Rorty himself before he died. The reader interested in Rorty will find the biography a mine of information, and will in (...) addition get a good sense of how Rorty thought and where his ideas came from. Yet this biographical material, which the author himself describes as straightforward narrative, occupies only 200 of the 360 pages of the text. The other 45% of the .. (shrink)

_Contents:_ Introduction, Bibliography and Textual Note Lecture I: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy Lecture II: What Pragmatism Means Lecture III: Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered Lecture IV: The One and the Many Lecture V: Pragmatism and Common Sense Lecture VI: Pragmatism's Conception of Truth Lecture VII: Pragmatism and Humanism Lecture VIII: Pragmatism and Religion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689–1920Bruce KuklickAlan P. F. Sell. Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689–1920. Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2004. Pp. 296. Cloth, £50.00This is a competent, clearly written, and authoritative exploration of its topic, in some respects a labor of love, for the author is both a pastor and a student of theology. Sell comprehensively examines the proliferation of dissenting academies and nonconformist colleges of England and (...) Wales, with some excursions into the Scottish scene, from the Toleration Act of 1689 through the early twentieth century. For the 230 years of this study, a great variety of schools, many of which had only a brief moment of existence, and most of which were barely funded, offered training for the ministers of over a dozen protestant denominations in Britain. Often one man provided instruction in subjects as diverse as mathematics, science, and literature—as well as religious fields.Sell does not focus on ministerial training or even theology, but the way in which the nonconforming religious élite expounded on and was taught philosophy. Thus, one sees how a diverse group that surely had sectarian needs in mind was also interested in grasping how thinkers outside its belief system approached basic problems of human existence. Over time Descartes and other continental rationalists, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists, Kant and Hegel, and the nineteenth-century British idealists were taught by the dissenting professoriate. In summarizing its interpretation, Sell presents a history of modern Anglo-European philosophy as it was refracted in the minds of (some) English-speaking Protestants. Their emphases are not unexpected: empiricism is somewhat devalued, and rationalistic and a priori modes of thinking perhaps inflated. The ethical implications of epistemology and metaphysics are most carefully explicated, and what is taken to be most strategic for [End Page 211] Reformed theology is underscored. Overall, if one is tempted to generalize (as Sell himself does not), the positions reached are credible and not out of line with the philosophical cutting edge of each era.For the most part the dissenters were not themselves creative philosophers of the first rank, but Sell rightly puts forward (206) a short list of thinkers at these schools who have genuine claims to merit, and my own very short list would include Richard Price, James Martineau, and Robert Mackintosh.The author uses diverse strategies to give readers a sense of the effort of these mostly forgotten men. To some extent the book is a biographical compendium, with brief sections on individual or paired thinkers. But Sell also offers coverage by denomination, and he adds a series of discussions by topics—on an assortment of recurring dilemmas in moral philosophy and on apologetics. A final and most useful feature of the book is a trio of indices, in addition to the very full notes and a complete bibliography, mainly of the writings of the many authors cited. Two of the indices are standard, but helpful, lists of persons and topics; the third one is a compendium of all the academies Sell treats, as well as their denominational affiliation, and the duration of their existences.Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity has the defects of its virtues. It is encyclopedic in nature, available for reference but unlikely to be read as a synthetic book, except by devotees of a certain kind of historical philosophical theology. The author also presumes his readers are unlikely to tackle the volume unless they have a prior attraction. That is, the book is written without much contextual explication, and attention to the needs of the non-specialist certainly would have made the volume of wider interest. The work is still relatively brief, under 300 pages, and because of its character, I would have liked to have seen a series of maps that pinpointed the whereabouts of the dissenting schools, giving the reader a visual sense of when and where they arose and declined among particular denominations, and that informed us of what the relations were among the successive professors who defined the learning.Bruce KuklickUniversity of PennsylvaniaCopyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

This essay first traces change in, roughly, the epistemology of the humanities from the 1950s to the 21st century. The second section looks at how the meaning and options in moral philosophy altered in more or less the same period. The last and easily most speculative section examines how these changes permeated American culture, and how professional philosophers responded to the challenges of the new political world they inhabited.

Stuart Macintyre, The Poor Relation. A History of Social Sciences in Australia Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 355-358 DOI 10.1007/s11024-011-9173-3 Authors Henrika Kuklick, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, 303 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304, USA Journal Minerva Online ISSN 1573-1871 Print ISSN 0026-4695 Journal Volume Volume 49 Journal Issue Volume 49, Number 3.

A model constructed from the "ideal observer" ethical theory accounts for many pervasive peculiarities of the craft of history and reflects central elements of the mind of the practicing historian. Both the ideal historian and the ideal observer can be characterized by the same adjec tives: omniscient, disinterested, dispassionate, consistent, objective, and empirical. In discussions of human conduct historians try to make evaluations from the point of view of an ideal observer. The historian's ideal of objectivity, his faith in a (...) basic ontological structure which gives order and intelligibility to the world, and his "method of empathic understanding" are all illuminated by the model. (shrink)