In the ordinary routine of studying the history of Western philosophy, few avenues lead us to American thinkers. After all, the late Colonial period, when one might imagine American philosophy to begin, is the 18th Century and is coincident with the second half of a typical course in the Modern Era, already fully stuffed with the Rationalists and the Empiricists of Europe. By the 19th Century, the nation's first century of existence, European philosophy has split into diverse directions; explorations of Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche seem far more important to the typical 19th Century course than do the Federalists, the Transcendentalists, or the Pragmatists of America. Finally, the typical course in contemporary philosophy (the 20th Century) is dominated by Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, the Logical Positivists, and their successors; the closest that we get lies in the fact (an accident of history) that many of the Positivists removed to America before or after World War II. The prejudice of most historians of Western philosophy seems to be that American thought has always been a backwater, merely responding to the lead of the great European thinkers. Some have even argued that Americans are downright anti-intellectual and simply not equipped for reflective or critical thinking.
What, then, is a course on American philosophy? In all honesty, there are not many current models; however, there are some out-of-print volumes addressing the subject. One of the oldest (1963), A History of American Philosophy, by Herbert Schneider, began with Puritan thought in the Colonial days, continued with political enlightenment, moved to Transcendentalism, and concluded with the development of Pragmatism, from Charles Sanders Peirce to William James and John Dewey. Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphey's A History of American Philosophy (1977), in two largish volumes, gives special attention to the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, offers a more detailed discussion of American academic centers and their European influences, and goes slightly beyond the Pragmatists by discussing C. I. Lewis. Bruce Kuklick's The Rise of American Philosophy(1977) deals only with academic philosophy at Harvard from 1860 to 1930. A later book by John J. Stuhr (1987), Classical American Philosophy and subtitled "Essential Readings . ." deals only with the Pragmatists.
Let us take a fresh start. It seems to me that there are really two ways to go about a course of this kind. One would be to select professional (academic) philosophers in America, largely from 1850 onward, and to demonstrate how they contributed to the traditional (and typically Western) discussions of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics that began in ancient Greece and have dominated the whole tradition of Western philosophy. A quite different course would be to allow Americans their own distinctive philosophical material; that is, we could simply ask what questions have Americans taken seriously enough that they have devoted careful, critical thinking to their solution. Philosophy, in this view, is not a specific set of questions, or problems, but rather a discipline of thinking, arguing, plotting out, and communicating positions on whatever is timely to a people.
The present course has been designed primarily with the second alternative in mind. It invites us to ask what questions have dominated serious American thinking over the two centuries of our country's being. It will be no surprise, perhaps, that political issues have been high (if not highest) in the list. But there is also a persistent quest to understand the natural world that environs us and to decide whether that world is best ordered and understood through religious traditions or scientific investigation. So many diverse people have come to live in America that this has been a problem in itself. In transporting European-style societies to the New World, people have been met by the challenges of their diverse backgrounds as well as by the nature of the continent and its open frontier. The whole project forced people to ask questions about the nature of human life and society and especially about human character. While Americans looked to European thinkers for many of their insights and inspirations, Pragmatism was, indeed, an essentially American product of thought, exploring the age-old questions of how to think and judge clearly.
Running throughout this course is an overriding question of great urgency. What is America? (What does it mean to be an American?) No one quite knows the answer(s) but the question is more important today than ever. This continent was the traditional homeland of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people, who were possibly here as early as 40,000 BC but were definitely here from 10,000 B.C. onward. The continent was invaded, ransacked, and colonized, from 1492 onward by the Spanish, the British, the French, and the Russians (more or less in that order). Africans came here under the chains of slavery; Asians came here under conditions only slightly better. Indigenous people were killed by European diseases, enslaved, moved about, and ultimately herded onto reservations. By the Nineteenth Century, America was a target of opportunity and site of immigration for all other Europeans as well. Immigrants came from all over the world well into the Twentieth Century. We call it a "melting pot," but what does that mean. Is there a distinctive American culture to which these immigrants have adapted their lives? Is there, in fact, any agreement about what culture is? even about what problems need to be faced? Perhaps, in fact, this is the spirit of America --- that it is more a pursuit of freedom and place than it is an embrace of culture of any kind. Perhaps, in that sense, it is also an historic experiment --- just how far can a people go without embracing a single culture and, instead, intentionally embracing cultural pluralism or outright cultural nihilism.
Personal Information
My office is Parsons 249. My office phone number is 607-3148. My HomePage is at http://www2.hmc.edu/~TBeckman/. The best way to contact me and get a quick response is by e-mail at Tad_Beckman@HMC.EDU.
Assignments and Expectations
All of the course materials are available on the WWW. The course HomePage is at http://www4.hmc.edu/humanities/phil105. Since these materials will be updated and maintained there throughout the semester, please be sure to check assignments and course notes periodically.
Attendance and participation in class discussions are expected. Since the bulk of class time will be devoted to discussion of the texts, it is essential that everyone finish the assigned reading before class and be prepared to talk about it and ask questions.
There will be scheduled quizzes on the reading, three argumentative papers on assigned questions, and several writing assignments on the Web. The final paper, due during final exam week, is meant to be comprehensive. The assignment sheet for the papers is included within the Web materials; it includes the project.
This course will participate in the newly constructed HMC Conferencing Site. A link to this site (http://www4.hmc.edu/webx) will be found on the course HomePage. There is also a link back to the HomePage on the course Conference folder.
Grading will be based on the following approximate distribution of emphasis:
Quizzes (5) 25% Midterm Papers (3) 30% Final Paper 15% Web Assignments (5) 10% Class participation 20%
Required Texts
I have ordered the following books through Huntley Bookstore:
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