American philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries

« 1888), Frederick Henry Hedge (1805-90), George Ripley (1802-80), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Margaret Fuller(1810-50) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-62).

Among these, Emerson and Thoreau stand out for their power aswriters, and for their influence on such subsequent philosophers as James, Dewey, Nietzsche, and Ghandi.

Emerson enjoyed a highly visible career as a lecturer and writer.

His sources include the classical philosophy he studied atHarvard, English and German Romantic poetry and philosophy, Hinduism and other non-Western philosophies and, ofcourse, Christianity.

Emerson's first book, Nature calls for a new ‘original relation to the universe' (Emerson 1836). His controversial ‘Divinity School Address' (1838) condemns the ‘Monster' of historical Christianity and urges the divinity graduates to find their own original natures, without which they can offer nothing to others.

One makes themost sense to others, Emerson holds, by diving deeply into one's own heart.

Emerson's First Series (1841) and Second Series (1844) of essays offer striking aphorisms and powerful paragraphs advocating a life of ‘self-reliance', expanding ‘circles', deep-seeing ‘intellect', and balanced ‘experience'.

Representative Men (1850) and The Conduct of Life (1860) are important later works.

Thoreau thought of philosophy as a practice: a life of ‘simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust' (Thoreau 1854).

Walden is a record of that practice, based on two years spent living in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, and offers a series of reflections on nature and human life.Thoreau finds the mass of men and women living ‘lives of quiet desperation', driving themselves like slaves.

InWalden 's long opening chapter on Economy, Thoreau construes his life at Walden as an ‘experiment' to show how little is really necessary for life and, by contrast, how needlessly complex most people's lives happen to be.

Laterchapters blend descriptions of Walden Pond with reflections on the peculiar power of literature - ‘the work of artnearest to life itself' (Thoreau 1854), on reading, vegetarianism, spring, ice, living in the present andneighbourliness.

Thoreau's other works include his essays ‘Walking' (1862), and the influential ‘Civil Disobedience'(1849).

After the Civil War (1861-5), two of the many philosophical clubs scattered throughout the East andMidwest played a special role in the development of American philosophy.

The ‘St.

Louis Hegelians' were led byWilliam Torrey Harris (1835-1909) and Hans Conrad Brokmeyer (1826-1906).

Brokmeyer emigrated to the US fromPrussia in 1844, practised law, and eventually became lieutenant governor of Missouri.

A leader in the Germancommunity, he worked on a translation of Hegel's Logic , which circulated in manuscript.

Harris, a native of Connecticut who left Yale in his junior year, taught school in St.

Louis and eventually became United StatesCommissioner of Education.

He studied Bronson Alcott and Emerson, Goethe and Victor Cousin; with Brokmeyer, hefounded the St.

Louis Philosophical Club in 1866 and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867.

The latter was the first technical philosophical journal in the USA or England, and published papers not only by US and EnglishHegelians such as Harris and Edward Caird, but by Peirce, Dewey, and William James (parts of The Principles of Psychology were first published in the journal).

A few weeks of joint philosophical efforts among the Midwest and Eastern ‘idealists' and the university professors of philosophy occurred during the summers of 1879-83, when theConcord School, founded by Emerson and Alcott, enlisted Harris, William James, Benjamin Peirce (Charles' father, aHarvard professor of mathematics), James McCosh (last of the Princeton Scottish realists), George Sylvester Morris(the Hegelian teacher of Dewey and Royce at Hopkins), and Emerson himself as lecturers.

The CambridgeMetaphysical Club had its origins in James' 1868 proposal to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (1841-1935) that they shouldestablish ‘a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadestquestions' (Kuklick 1977: 47 ).

By 1871 the club centred around six men, all with Harvard degrees: James and Holmes, Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright, Nicholas St.

John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner.

Green, a Bostonattorney, introduced the thought of the British psychologist and philosopher Alexander Bain (1818-1903),particularly his definition of belief as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act'.

Wright was a mathematicianemployed by the Nautical Almanac as a 'calculator', and an occasional lecturer in psychology and physics at Harvard.

He applied Darwin's evolutionary theory to the development of consciousness in such publications as‘Evolution of Consciousness' (1873), maintaining that consciousness comes about not from any new capacity but from using an old capacity - forming images - in a new way (see Evolution, theory of ).

3 Classical American philosophy Although Wright was regarded as the leader of the Metaphysical Club, Peirce and then James proved to be its most significant members.

Peirce seemed destined for intellectual achievement from an early age, and he began publishing papers on logic and semiotics in the 1860s.

‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities' (1868)contains the first published statement of his view that all thought is in signs, and ‘On a New List of Categories'(1867) a first statement of his categorial scheme.

Peirce presented what came to be called ‘the pragmatic maxim' tothe Metaphysical Club in an 1872 version of his paper ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878): ‘Consider what effects,which might conceivably have practical bearing, we conceive the object of our conception to have.

Then ourconception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object'.

In ‘The Fixation of Belief' (1877) Peirceconsiders four ways in which we come to form beliefs: by authority, tenacity (holding on to the beliefs one alreadyhas), rationality, or science.

Only science, Peirce argues, has the integrity that comes from allowing itself to bedetermined by 'some external permanency by something upon which our thinking has no effect' (Peirce 1877).Peirce worked at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in the 1860s and 1870s, and was appointed to a lectureship inlogic in the new Graduate School at Johns Hopkins in 1879; but he was dismissed in 1884 and, despite occasionallectures at Harvard arranged by William James, never taught regularly again.

In a series of papers in The Monist in the early 1890s he developed a system of metaphysics according to which absolute chance operates in theuniverse, but so does ‘evolutionary love'; and matter is ‘effete mind'.

Central to Peirce's many writings was the ideaof three categories, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

He held that all signs are ‘thirds': besides a purelylinguistic element and an object of reference, they contain an irreducible element of interpretation.

William James studied chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in the 1860s, and biology with Louis Agassiz(including fifteen months in Brazil), receiving his degree in medicine in 1869.

He began teaching anatomy andphysiology in 1872, and became an assistant professor of psychology in 1875, when he established the firstpsychological laboratory in America.

James' earliest publications did not report research in physiology or the newpsychophysics, however, but were a series of critiques of books on science, philosophy and culture.

He RoutledgeEncyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998) American philosophy in the 18th. »