Erin McKenna (Pacific Lutheran) is responsible
for eliciting these autobiographical statements,
and the Pragmatism Cybrary is pleased to archive them.
James Campbell, University of Toledo
Michael Eldridge, UNC at Charlotte
Russell Goodman, University of New Mexico
Peter Hare, SUNY at Buffalo
Larry Hickman, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
John Lachs, Vanderbilt University
Ruth Anna Putnam, Wellesley College
John Ryder, SUNY Administration
John E. Smith, Yale University
I owe my initial interest in philosophy to Uncle Sam. After high school, I entered the army in the hope of getting enough money through the G.I. Bill to pay for college, but without much sense of what I would major in once I enrolled. My army experience solved that problem for me. Through its relentless pursuit of action without reason and power without responsibility, the army brought home to me the importance of questioning what we do with our lives. I went on to study philosophy at a major metropolitan university, but I found myself unsatisfied there. I was smart enough to do the work and settled right into the contemporary context of wondering how much ducks resembled rabbits and whether Brown had taken up residence in Boston or in Barcelona. We undergraduates similarly puzzled over the issue of whether monkeys could create art. We accepted as fundamental the beliefs that ethics could not be naturalistic and that meta-ethics was more important anyway. And we became comfortable with the dogma that, while we might not fully understand all of this, further pursuit of abstracted logical forms would eventually make it all clear.
As I said, I was smart enough — perhaps clever enough would be better — to do this sort of philosophical work; but I was not really satisfied with what I was doing. Moreover, I certainly would not have been drawn to this sort of intellectual puzzling had I not had a kind of prior commitment to what I thought philosophy could do to make my life-choices more rational and beneficial. My undergraduate experience demonstrated to me that, to use Dewey’s terms, the problems of philosophers were more important in contemporary philosophical circles than the problems of people. This was not the sort of philosophizing that I wanted to do.
I mention Dewey here because it was about this time that I discovered the work of the American Pragmatists: James and Dewey and Mead. Although I knew that the sort of philosophy that the Pragmatists offered was despised by my teachers as antique and inadequate — and while I sensed that it really was in some ways outdated — I also saw that the Pragmatists cared about what I cared about.
When I thought about the nature of the difference between the philosophy that I had been studying as an undergraduate and the Pragmatic philosophy that I wanted to pursue, I realized that it was in the goal of the philosophizing. I had been drawn to philosophy by something moral rather than narrowly intellectual. What I wanted was to use philosophy to help me decide how to live my life; but what I had been getting was an approach to philosophizing that showed me how to avoid intellectual pitfalls (pitfalls like being deceived by the participants at a female impersonators’ convention whom no normal person ever seemed to encounter anyway).
“Philosophy,” as we all know, means the love of wisdom. The “love” part of the
definiens is the easier one to understand. It implies pursuit, study, effort, care — the attempt to integrate wisdom into our ways of living. The “wisdom” part is much tougher to grasp. Moreover, I was attempting to balance two wholly different approaches to wisdom: one intellectual, and the other moral. The intellectual conception of philosophy urges us to seek the true, a broader range of clarity and heightened understanding. It calls on us to follow in the footsteps of philosophers like Russell, Carnap and Quine in attempting to find out
what is and to become more accurate in how we describe it. The moral conception of philosophy, on the other hand, urges us to search for the good, to sift desiderata in search of the
desiderandum. It calls on us to follow James, Dewey and Mead — and Socrates, Emerson and Marx — to address issues of broad social concern in hopes of finding out how to live together. Eventually in graduate school I saw that this dichotomizing of philosophy into intellectual and moral breaks down when I recognized that I could not do the work of moral philosophy very well without the contribution of intellectual philosophy. As it became clear to me that we cannot attain a worthwhile sense of how to live without a heightened intellectual sense of our situations, however, it also became clear that those who saw intellectual philosophy as primary were seldom so open-minded.
Although decades have passed, it is clear that the intellectual conception of philosophy remains triumphant: the job of the philosopher is to puzzle over intellectual questions. It is possible to give any number of interpretations for this long-standing reality. One is that philosophers have justifiably striven to escape from the apologetic/homiletic tradition that long subsumed philosophy under theology. Another is that the professionalization of the field, locating it within departments on university campuses, has allowed a narrowed focus that eliminates concerns ‘extraneous’ to the intellectual task. When self-selecting academic philosophers are speaking or writing for an audience of their fellows rather than for a broader public, it is not unreasonable to expect a conception of the field that overemphasizes logic and metaphysics and epistemology. (Other academic disciplines are, of course, equally guilty in their own ways of abandoning their public audience.) A third reason for the primacy of intellectual over moral philosophy is the personal safety that it offers from the sort of outside interference that might be visited upon us if we were perceived to get social and political issues wrong. Intellectual philosophers can set their research agendas without much worry about public intrusion. Other explanations are possible.
Regardless of the explanation(s) offered for the pre-eminence of intellectual philosophy, however, there are various problems related to our current situation. Primary from my perspective is that we have lost our social anchor and are drifting in clusters of isolated intellectuals detached from the issues and problems of our society. We have as a profession begun to recognize this and have inched toward improvement: ethics has become less ‘meta-’ and more substantive; critical thinking has arisen as a counterbalance to abstract logic; applied philosophy has created a significant place for itself. Still, it is fair to wonder whether the conception of philosophy as primarily intellectual has itself come into question. It seems to me that it has not. Rather, what has happened is that the narrow focus of intellectual philosophy has broadened, if only somewhat. Applied philosophy, for example, while a valuable step in the right direction, is too often seen as just another area within philosophy where people simply do intellectual work about more practical questions. Under the moral conception of philosophy, application is an essential element of philosophic practice; and, if we saw all philosophy as consciously related to building a better world, we would recognize that our classroom goal should always be the cooperative education of our fellow citizens and that our philosophical inquiries must make some difference in the social arena.
Of course, I cannot prove that this is what philosophy should be doing. Moreover, to argue for the centrality of moral criteria in the evaluation of our philosophical practice will probably have little impact on those who may not even include such criteria in the first place. But philosophy has not always been academic, and academic philosophy has not always been so narrow. One of the central goals that drives my work in the history of American philosophy is to make this broader past more widely known.
(June 2002, revised March 2006)
The first time I was fired from a job that I wanted to keep was on January
11, 1977. The reasons were complex but the precipitating event was
my questioning, as an ethics teacher, the newly enforced mandatory retirement
policy of the Ethical Culture Schools. I immediately enrolled in the
M.A. program in philosophy at Columbia University. (I could afford to do
so because I had a contract with the New York Society for Ethical Culture and
they had to pay me for six more months.) I wanted to go to Columbia
because it was convenient, had a long association with the ethical humanist
movement, had a good reputation and it was, after all, the university where
John Dewey had flourished. (But, of course, neither interest in Dewey
nor pragmatism were much in evidence by the time I got there.) I had
discovered Dewey’s reconstruction of religion during my last semester at
Yale Divinity School in a course on Christian naturalism taught by the Jesuit
philosopher Robert Johann, author of The Pragmatic Meaning of God, and I had
continued to read Dewey while an activist parish minister in Baltimore and
during my brief association with the New York Society. After the
Society's contract ended, I financed my philosophy graduate work by working
for Merrill Lynch. But that did not last long. Then I found more
satisfying work as the director of citizen participation for the Westchester
Community Opportunity Program. But as I neared the end of the master's
program, I decided that I was more interested in philosophy than community
organizing. I could not—as a father of two children--continue to
afford Columbia's high tuition, and my wife did not like living in New York
City. So I applied for the Ph.D. program at the University of Florida,
which was much cheaper and, making the enterprise more palatable to my wife,
within two hours of where her family now lived.
Florida was a good choice in terms of me being able to afford graduate school.
I was soon teaching not only in the philosophy department, where I had an
assistantship, but also in the religion department. But the philosophers
at Florida were not as excited as I was about Dewey. Fortunately, I
found a philosophically astute and patient advisor, Ellen Haring, to direct my
idiosyncratic dissertation on philosophy as a religious practice.
The second time I was fired from a job that I wanted to keep was in 1994.
I had come (in 1989) from Spring Hill College (Mobile, Alabama) to be a part
of an exciting new interdisciplinary program at Queens College in Charlotte,
North Carolina. By now my interest in Dewey and democracy as a way of
life was well developed and I was eager to write a book. But the
administration did not share my enthusiasm for democratic governance. In
May of 1994 I was told—without any warning and hence no due process--that
the coming academic year would be my last one at Queens. The cause this
time was, I was told by the college president, that I did not have the right
attitudes in terms of religion to continue to chair the department of
philosophy and religion. The college apparently wanted a Christian in my
position—and someone less troublesome than I.
I was able, however, to negotiate that my final year would have no teaching
or administrative responsibilities, leaving me free to begin the book that I
wanted to write. So that is what I did. I worked on the book,
writing the first four chapters. I was also looking for a job.
When I did not find one, I took a "full-time/part-time" position at
the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. There, despite teaching
four courses a semester at just over half my former salary and with no
benefits, I was able to write the last two chapters. The book was
eventually published in 1998 as Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural
Instrumentalism.
Still unable to find a regular appointment, I hung on at UNC Charlotte,
supplementing my income by teaching logic and critical thinking at Carolinas
College of Health Sciences. Finally, in 1999 the university made my
lecturer position a contractual one (instead of semester-to-semester), raised
my salary significantly and provided me with benefits. Publishing the
book helped bring this about, as well as my being named a Democracy and
Education Fellow by the Center for Dewey Studies.
Now I am busily engaged in various projects. So much so that the
philosophy department has twice given me course reductions. Among these
projects are the writing of the introduction to the second volume of the Dewey
correspondence, developing editorial projects for Thoemmes Press, and
organizing sessions at professional meetings on pragmatic ethics and pragmatic
approaches to social problems. I am also presenting papers and writing
essays that I hope will come together as a second book, tentatively titled,
“Mapping the Middle: Pragmatism’s Problem.”
I came to the study of Dewey because of his naturalism. But, due in part
to the unpragmatic way I have pursued my interests and the personally
difficult fallout therefrom, I have come to appreciate more fully Dewey’s
pragmatic naturalism. Some of us are slow learners.
My formal study of American philosophy, as of everything else that I write
about now, was pretty sketchy. Indeed, I absorbed the 60’s zeitgeist
according to which there is nothing alive in the American traditions. So
even though I was an undergraduate at Penn, where Murphey and Flower taught
American philosophy, I never took any of their courses. (I did read
Varieties of Religious Experience though, in a religion class, I think.)
I first studied William James as a philosopher in graduate school at Johns
Hopkins when I was a TA for Maurice Mandelbaum. He assigned The Will to
Believe for his intro course, but it didn’t make a great impression on me.
I read Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty and Experience and Nature when I
began my teaching career at New Mexico, and I used the former routinely in my
epistemology courses. But most of my work in those days was on
Wittgenstein, and curiously it was Wittgenstein who led me to American
philosophy in the 1980s--via Stanley Cavell. For Cavell’s
interpretations of Wittgenstein in Must We Mean What We Say? The Claim of
Reason, and In Quest of the Ordinary turned out to be increasingly entwined
with discussions of two American philosophers: Emerson and Thoreau.
And somehow I put together the little I knew about American thought with what
I was learning from Cavell, to rediscover (for I now know that Rene Bertholet,
Jean Wahl and Eduard Baumgarten were there before) that there is a Romantic
tradition in American philosophy encompassing not only Emerson and Thoreau,
but James and Dewey (and I would add in our own day Rorty and Putnam and
Cavell, though each in different ways). After this idea for American
Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition came to me, the rest was in the
details--and how many there proved to be!
Perhaps because I am not satisfied within the confines of any one tradition of
philosophical thinking,--or to put it more positively, think that we can draw
profitably on many philosophical traditions, I’ve been able first to find my
way into the American tradition and then to discover the deep relations of
that tradition to figures in European and even Asian philosophy. So
I’ve written about Emerson’s relation to Nietzsche and to Hinduism, and,
in my new book, about Wittgenstein and William James.
There seems to be more rather than less to think about in the various
traditions of American thought. In the next year or two I hope to
complete a four volume compendium of works in and about pragmatism for
Routledge, essays on James and Bergson and Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic
education; and then to work towards a reading of Emerson’s
‘system’--of how his ideas fit together.
Coming from a family in which philosophizing was a favorite sport and a
church boarding school where philosophy was taught in many guises, perhaps
inevitably I fell into philosophy as an undergraduate at Yale in the
mid-1950’s. In the Yale department at that time were representatives of a
wide range of viewpoints: Brand Blanshard, Paul Weiss, Charles Hendel,
Frederick Fitch, Carl Hempel, Robert Brumbaugh, and Arthur Pap. The junior
faculty included Nathaniel Lawrence, John E. Smith and Irwin Lieb. Richard
Bernstein and Richard Rorty were graduate students. George Schrader was the
lecturer in the introductory course where John Silber was the TA leading my
discussion section. Silber, a rabid Kantian, was the person with whom I had my
first heated philosophical arguments as an adult. One of the texts in the
course was Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct----my first exposure to
pragmatism. From as early as I can remember, my philosophical ideal has been a
system of ideas that is both radically humanistic and radically scientific.
This ideal together with a closely connected obsession with the relationality
of reality led me to write my thesis on Whitehead’s metaphysics. I found it
enormously stimulating and fulfilling to study process metaphysics at the same
time that I was sweating blood in a seminar in which Pap required us to read
with excruciating care his Elements of Analytic Philosophy, all of Feigl and
Sellars, Readings in Philosophical Analysis, and most of Feigl and Brodbeck,
Readings in Philosophy of Science. Pap’s intellectual integrity and
seriousness were impressive. Insulting remarks that other faculty made about
Pap’s "positivism" shocked me.
My humanistic side was nurtured by Cecil Lang, a specialist in Victorian
literature in the English Department from whom I acquired a passion for the
work of Algernon Swinburne, and by my labors on the board of The Yale Literary
Magazine. I have fond memories of our special issues on such figures as Henri
Matisse and Dylan Thomas. Another of my ventures in the literary world was the
publication, with a friend, of two existentialist plays in French by a young
member of the Yale faculty.
I entered Columbia’s graduate program in the fall of 1957. My choice of
Columbia was influenced partly by my fiancee Daphne Kean’s being in her
senior year at Barnard and by her desire to attend Cornell Medical School in
New York City. Immediately I was struck by the hostile attitude of Columbia
philosophers toward my Yale heroes. Coming on the heels of my experience with
Yale’s treatment of Pap, this hostility deeply disturbed me. I sought
arguments that would show how the tenets of apparently conflicting
philosophies were really complementary. An M.A. thesis and later article on W.
H. Sheldon’s philosophy of polarity came out of this reaction to "the
strife of systems". It was at that time that I discovered in myself what
I have sometimes described as an irenic impulse. Looking back on my entire
career, it is apparent that that ecumenical attitude has dominated my
philosophical life. While writing on Sheldon, I started working with Joseph
Blau, and it was through him and his publications that I first became
acquainted with the panorama of American philosophy from colonial times to the
present. I greatly admired the fairmindedness found everywhere in his work.
Though he favored a version of the Deweyan naturalism that pervaded the
Columbia department at the time, that preference did not lessen his
open-minded curiosity about all other types of philosophy found in America.
His brand of curiosity I have taken as a model ever since. Perhaps the fact
that my maternal and paternal ancestors stretching back to colonial times have
been members of the social and intellectual elite in this country has played a
role in my interest in American intellectual history. I have often wondered
whether in my case a commitment to American philosophy is a form of (extended)
family loyalty. In any event, pragmatism was attractive as a
"mediating" philosophy. Here I found, especially in Peirce, a system
of ideas that was simultaneously humanistic and scientific. Having taken
seminars from Justus Buchler and being familiar with his book on Peirce, I
approached him about possible dissertation topics. After I explained my
interests, including my continuing obsession with relationality, he suggested
that I write on G. H. Mead’s metaphysics of sociality. So my dissertation
was in some ways a continuation of my Yale undergraduate thesis.
The character of my subsequent career flowed, I believe, from what I have
already mentioned. For example, my collaboration with Edward Madden in a book
on C. J. Ducasse appealed greatly to me because Ducasse had constructed an
elaborate philosophical system that was both rigorously analytic and deeply
humanistic. My many years as chair of a large and diverse graduate department
at Buffalo gave me ample opportunity to exercise my irenic urges. My
preoccupation with relationality and my family loyalty found an outlet in the
preparation of a biography of Elsie Clews Parsons, the first woman president
of the American Anthropological Association and my great aunt. A partnership
with my late wife, a professor of medicine and a leader in feminist politics
and the civil liberties movement, was also crucial. Both my ecumenism and my
love of the American tradition have found an outlet in more than 30 years of
editing
The Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in
American Philosophy.
Larry Hickman
Director, Center for Dewey Studies
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
As an undergraduate psychology major, I think I enrolled in all four of the
philosophy courses that Hardin-Simmons University offered in those days.
My next stop was the University of Texas, which turned out to be an
intellectual banquet of almost indescribable richness. Its philosophy
faculty included George Gentry and David Miller, who had been students of
George Herbert Mead. Charles Hartshorne had just arrived from Emory.
The department chairs during those years, John Silber and Irwin C. Lieb, were
busy using Texas oil money to collect the very best faculty and graduate
students they could find. As a result of their efforts, I was able to
attend lectures by J. N. Findlay, Marjorie Greene, O.K. Bowsma, Charles
Hartshorne, Karsten Harries, Chet Lieb, Louis Mackey, and much, much more.
In addition, each week the department brought in some philosophical star for
the Friday colloquium.
It was during Lieb’s seminar on Charles Peirce that I began to puzzle over
Peirce’s cryptic definition of logic. “Logic,” he wrote, “is
said to treat of second intentions as applied to first.” (CP1.559.) I
polled the thirty-plus members of the faculty to find out if anyone knew what
Peirce had meant, but I didn’t have much luck until I got to Ignacio
Angelelli, who had recently arrived from a faculty appointment at Notre Dame.
He told me that he couldn’t give me a quick answer, but that he sure knew
how to find out. If I wanted to follow Peirce’s lead, I would have to
learn to read abridged Latin and spend some time with fifteenth and sixteenth
century logic texts.
Delighted, I enrolled in an intensive Latin course and began to work under
Angelelli’s guidance. A small study became a dissertation, and then,
thanks to two years spent visiting European libraries as a fellow of the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I was able to begin revising and enlarging
the manuscript in ways that led to its publication in 1980.
Along the way, reading all those old books, I started thinking about the
effects of the technological revolution that had been spawned by the
development of printing. It was clear that a second major technological
revolution was under way during my own lifetime. I turned to the works
of Walter Ong and Marshal McLuhan to help me sort out the relationship between
the two events. I started reading everything I could find in the
philosophy, history, and sociology of technology.
In 1973, while I was still in Germany, Douglas Browning, who was by then
the chair of the Texas philosophy department, offered me a one-year
appointment to teach a course named after Whitehead’s book Science and
the Modern World. I taught it as a course in the philosophy of
technology.
The next year Manual Davenport, head of the department of philosophy and
humanities at Texas A&M, hired me to teach a course called “Technology
and Human Values.” Reading Dewey with increasing care, I was surprised
to learn that he had already advanced a philosophical critique of
technological culture a couple of decades before Heidegger’s Sein und
Zeit. I took over a course on American philosophy that was on the books,
but that was hardly ever offered. I thus began teaching Charles Peirce,
William James, John Dewey, and G. H. Mead to the Texas Aggies. John J.
McDermott, who arrived as the new department head in 1977, provided exactly
the stimulus I needed to continue to develop my ideas about pragmatism and
technology. Then, a generous grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities in 1987-88 provided the opportunity to finish an
extended study of Dewey’s critique of technology, which was published as
John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology in 1990.
One of the reasons why I was excited about Dewey’s technological metaphors
was that they offered a productive alternative to popular
“end-of-philosophy” arguments. I didn’t like Wittgenstein’s “therapeutic dismissal” and I thought that Heidegger’s “heroic
demolition” model was even worse. Even though MacIntyre’s
neo-classical “salvaging operation” seemed a little bit better, none of
those views appeared to offer much in the way of plans for future action.
So I settled on Dewey’s suggestion that philosophy should be a kind of
reconstruction. Pushing his metaphor somewhat, I began to think of
philosophy as a kind recycling activity – a kind of technology for melting
down old rusting essences and other idols of the tribe and turning them into
new and better products. Put another way, I wanted to help foster better
philosophical ecology.
In 1993 I left Texas A&M to become director of the Center for Dewey
Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Since that time, the
Center has produced an electronic edition of Dewey’s
Collected Works, and we
will soon complete work on an electronic edition of his correspondence (over
20,000 items). I continue to edit writings by and about Dewey, and to
publish books and essays that explore his critique of technology. I
continue to teach courses in the philosophy of technology and American
philosophy to our graduate and undergraduate students. And despite the
claims of some that philosophy is at an end or that it doesn’t have any more
work to do, I continue to think that philosophy has a wonderfully
reconstructive role to play in our technological culture.
John
Lachs
Vanderbilt University
It was easy for me to find philosophy. As many
teenagers, I was interested in momentous issues: I wanted to know about
God, immortality and the meaning of life. I found working with ideas
irresistibly attractive and wished to develop resources for effective reflection
on human nature. When I went to college, the only question I needed to ask
was which of the many departments that vied for the attention of students dealt
with the topics I wanted to investigate. Upon being told that it was
philosophy, I signed up as a major.
McGill University offered me a
thorough, historical introduction to philosophy. Graduate work reinforced
my native tendency to pluralism: the wide variety of philosophical styles
and projects that flourished in the Yale department of the late 1950s convinced
me that there is no royal road to philosophical insight. As if to
demonstrate this belief, I chose Brand Blanshard and Wilfrid Sellars as
co-directors of my dissertation.
The thought of George Santayana
found me through the agency of an undergraduate professor, T. G. Henderson, who
had written on Santayana with Whitehead, and decided to teach Scepticism and
Animal Faith in a senior seminar. I struggled for months to find the
decisive weakness of the book, believing that in some fashion that kept eluding
me, Santayana was clearly cheating.
I fought the book so hard that
it became a part of my life. Both my Master's thesis and my doctoral
dissertation were focused on Santayana's philosophy of mind and, for perhaps ten
years, I may have been the only living epiphenomenalist in the world.
Although John E. Smith was a shining presence at Yale, I took no courses with
him, opting instead to learn analytic philosophy from Arthur Pap and Wilfrid
Sellars, and metaphysics from Paul Weiss.
I read Dewey in those years and
found him terminally boring. I was expecting philosophy to reveal the
hidden structure of reality, but all I found in Dewey was a description of our
well-known everyday situation. It took me twenty years to realize that
probably there are no arcane facts, and even if there are, philosophy is
ill-equipped to discover them. Reading Dewey again helped me understand
this.
The second time around, I
thought Dewey was scintillating and in many particulars clearly right. I
began to teach American philosophy is earnest, expanding my reading and
reflection beyond Dewey to Peirce, James, Royce and Mead, and more recently to
Alain Locke, the personalists, Jane Addams and a host of lesser known or
neglected thinkers.
The activist element in
American philosophy seemed to fit well with my temperament. I value the
sort of robust engagement with the world that evokes personal activity and aims
at social improvement. Scholarly imprisonment in universities strikes me
as intellectually narrowing and emotionally impoverishing. It tends
to make professors timid and compliant souls. I am interested in ordinary
people and their problems because I see myself as no different from them; I
simply cannot take claims about aristocracy of any sort very seriously.
As a consequence, I love
philosophy for the perspectives it offers on human difficulties and the tools it
provides for their resolution. Thinking about what I see around me is one
of the great pleasures of my life; acting on what I believe combines the
satisfaction of being a whole person with the exhilaration of an experiment.
The theory of mediation I
developed in the '80s aims to explain the sources of manipulativeness,
irresponsibility and individual powerlessness in a populous, industrial society.
It has enabled me to see these and related alienation phenomena with a clarity,
and to understand them with a simplicity, I have not found in more metaphysical
and more tendentious accounts. Whenever I present these ideas to
non-professionals, they need little effort to recognize their condition and
apprehend its causes. Their responses add to my confidence that the theory
is on the right track.
One of my projects as a
technical philosopher is to develop an account of facts that pays equal heed to
Dewey's claim of the social construction of reality and Santayana's sense that
we are surrounded by independent forces. The resulting theory of
objective, conventional and choice-inclusive facts enables us to differentiate a
variety of human natures and promises to serve as the cognitive foundation of an
ethics of toleration.
But I do not want to be
absorbed in the technical details of the problems of philosophy. My
passion is to deploy philosophy to deal with the important issues that face us
as individuals, as a nation and as members of the human race. There is a
large public waiting anxiously for what philosophy can offer: for careful
thinking, clear vision and the intelligent examination of our values. That
is where the future of philosophy lies, that is where American philosophy has
always pointed us, and that is where I want to be.
Intellectual Biography of a Pragmatist
Ruth Anna Putnam
Wellesley College
Although I entered the University of California at Los Angeles intending to
become a chemist, I changed my mind when I took a course in inductive logic
from Hans Reichenbach. From then on, my heart belonged to philosophy.
Tragically, Reichenbach died while I was still an undergraduate, but I was
privileged to attend his wonderful course on the Philosophy of Space and Time,
as well as some others. His successor at UCLA was Rudolf Carnap, who
directed my dissertation.
I have no doubt that my admiration for Reichenbach explains my susceptibility
to the ideas of John Dewey and, later, of William James. In his Experience and
Prediction, Reichenbach explains his preference for what he calls a realistic
language as follows. We could not justify many of our actions, for example,
purchasing life insurance, if we restricted ourselves to speaking only of our
own sense-data and of constructions out of sense-data. For the claim that the
world will continue to exist after my death and the claim that it will cease
when I die translate into the same statement in the language of my sense-data.
Reichenbach thus agreed with all of the classical Pragmatists in rejecting
phenomenalism and in the kind of reasons he offers for that rejection.
Thanks to Reichenbach’s lasting influence on my thinking, it was easy for me
to become interested in the ideas of John Dewey once I was introduced to them.
As I recall, I encountered those ideas several times. There was a course in
Aesthetic taught by Abraham Kaplan in which Dewey’s Art as Experience
was used as a text. I also seem to recall that Ethics by Dewey and
Tufts was used in the introductory ethics course. But the credit for turning
me into a serious student of John Dewey must go to Donald Piatt and a seminar
of his, probably on ethics. He introduced me to Dewey’s Logic, a book
that my fellow graduate students tended to make fun of as being
unintelligible. From Piatt, who was praised in his obituary as an
eloquent spokesman for pragmatism, I learned to appreciate Dewey’s late
writing and, more importantly, to begin to think along Deweyan lines.
Some years later I enjoyed the challenge of trying to understand the strange
and wonderful system(s) of C. S. Peirce. For several years I taught a
senior seminar on Peirce and Dewey. In the early l980s I began to write in a
clearly Pragmatist vein. From then on I have dealt more than once with aspects
of the problem of moral objectivity, or the rejection of the fact-value
distinction. In 1989 my husband and I published a review of Gerald
Myers’ William James. Since then I have repeatedly written on William
James as well as on John Dewey. Both James and Dewey have the remarkable
ability of capturing one’s interest wherever one opens a text of theirs.
Dewey points out somewhere that what is often needed in order to solve a
problem is to see it in entirely new terms. What attracts me to the great
Pragmatists is sometimes that they see familiar philosophical problems in new
ways. For example, when James says that even a god could not make a common
world out of a collections of solipsistic worlds, tells me that instead of
wondering whether I am dreaming I should wonder how you and I manage to meet
in front of a particular building, that is, how we managed to refer to that
same building when we made our date. At other times what makes the Pragmatists
attractive is that they deal with issues that touch us where we live. Dewey's
writings on education are an obvious example as are James's on religious
belief and religious experience.
John Ryder
Director of the Office of International Programs
The State University of New York
When I left college with an undergraduate degree in philosophy I had learned
little or nothing about the history of American philosophy, its intellectual
traditions or its primary figures. In the department I was in, if it wasn’t
about language or logic, and if it wasn’t from Oxford or Cambridge, then it
wasn’t philosophy.
Given that background, I came to American philosophy rather by accident. I had
been taking part time graduate courses at Stony Brook through which I was
introduced to Justus Buchler and his work. I was impressed immediately by
Buchler himself and by his ideas. Through the study of his work, and through
working with him in the study and critique of the likes of Dewey, Santayana,
Whitehead and others, I quickly came to learn not only what American
philosophy consists of, but its extraordinary philosophical richness as well.
Working with Buchler, and with the several other graduate students then at
Stony Brook who were also working on one or another aspect of American
philosophy and who have proved to be influential in the field, I formed what
has turned out to be the primary direction of my philosophical work to date.
Buchler came to Stony Brook after a long and distinguished career at Columbia
University, where he was an important figure in what has come to be called
Columbia Naturalism, along with F. J. E. Woodbridge, John Dewey, John Herman
Randall Jr., Ernest Nagel and others. As I became more familiar with
Buchler’s work I began to look at the whole of the intellectual tradition in
which his work was situated, and again I discovered an interesting and fertile
set of ideas and philosophical approaches that was, and unfortunately still
is, largely ignored in contemporary philosophy. By the late 1970s, when I was
beginning to become familiar with American naturalism, most of the important
works were already out of print, and within ten years virtually all of them
were difficult to find. That was what led me to edit the collection of primary
work from the tradition, published in 1994 as American Philosophic
Naturalism in the Twentieth Century. The insights of the naturalist
tradition in metaphysics, epistemology, social and political thought,
education, as well as art and literature, struck me then, and continue to
today, as valuable alternative approaches to the analytic and continental
concepts and methods that dominate philosophy in America and Europe.
My interest in American philosophy has over the past 20 years also extended in
two other directions. One of them is to early American thought. Relatively few
philosophers in recent decades have paid much attention to 17th and 18th
century American philosophy, probably for a range of reasons. The fact is,
though, that there were extremely interesting philosophical developments
during the first half of the American experience that deserve much closer
attention. Philosophers can find a good deal of both interest and value in the
work of the mainstream Puritan thinkers of the 17th century; the influence of
Locke and Newton in the early 18th; the spread of Berkeley’s ideas through
the influence of Samuel Johnson; the attempts by Cotton Mather and Jonathan
Edwards to reconcile Puritanism with the “new knowledge” deriving largely
from England; the process of the transition of Puritan thinking into more
modern and secular forms; and of course the explosion of social and political
thought through the revolutionary period and after. In an effort to help
familiarize interested philosophers and others in this general period, Scott
Pratt and I have just published The Philosophical Writings of
Cadwallader Colden, which we hope to will to light to a greater extent than
has already been the case the work of this important colonial philosopher and
scientist.
The second direction in which my work has taken me is into the place of
American philosophy internationally, particularly in Central and Eastern
Europe. During the 1980s I was twice a visiting scholar, for a semester each
time, at Moscow State University, where I discovered that there was an
extensive body of secondary literature on the whole range of American thought
written by Soviet specialists. Most of this work was not and still has not
been translated in English, so it was for the most part unknown in the US. In
an effort to familiarize American specialists with this literature I wrote a
history of American philosophy through the Russian secondary sources, which
was published in 1999 as Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of
the History of American Thought. Interestingly, when the Soviet Union met its
demise in 1991, interest in American philosophy decreased considerably in
Russia, but at the same time there was a strong increase in American
philosophical traditions, primarily pragmatism, in slightly further west in
Europe. Today, a large number of philosophers, primarily in Poland and
Slovakia, but also in many surrounding countries, have been translating
American pragmatist books and publishing their own articles and books on
American philosophical themes. These philosophers tend to be less interested
in historical and textual questions, and more in applying the methods and
insights of pragmatism and other American traditions to the contemporary
philosophical and social issues of their societies. In an effort to facilitate
this process, we created in 2000 the Central European Pragmatist Forum, which
has as its primary goal to bring philosophers from Central and Eastern Europe
(CEPF) who are interested in American thought together with American
specialists. CEPF now meets every second year somewhere in the eastern half of
Europe, and each conference has been an occasion for interested European
philosophers to meet and work with leading American specialists, and for the
Americans to take the pulse of the ways in which ideas so familiar to us are
reworked in other societies.
It has been particularly gratifying to me to see philosophical ideas and
traditions that I value so highly taken up abroad. If there is a single theme
that runs through the dominant traditions of American thought it is that
intellectual activity is social in nature and its most valuable exercise is in
application, as Dewey once put it, to “the problems of men.” Therein will
lie its primary value in the future, whether in the states, in Europe, or
anywhere else.
Albany, New York
August, 2002
I became involved in American Philosophy over fifty years ago when I was a
graduate student at Columbia and my thesis advisor, Herbert Schneider,
suggested Royce’s application of Peirce’s theory of interpretation (in The
Problem of Christianity) as an original and fruitful topic. This proved to
be a happy choice because I was led to study carefully not only Royce’s
Problem but also his World and the Individual plus those papers of Peirce’s
which Royce cited as relevant to the general topic of community and
interpretation. I finished the task in 1948 and the results were published in
1950 under the title of Royce’s Social Infinite - that being my name for the
self-representative system that Royce developed in the Problem and which in
effect replaced his older conception of the Absolute. Not only did I
appreciate the brilliance of both thinkers, but I discovered that Peirce was
perfectly right to describe Royce as “our American Plato.” It was clear to
me at the outset that Peirce was attracted to Royce, more than to James and
Dewey, because of Royce’s speculative interest. That interest is very
powerful in Peirce (think of the “Neglected Argument”), but it was
obscured at that time by the belief that he was primarily a “logician” and
that, as Ayer would claim, his metaphysics was merely decorative. Nothing, of
course, could be further from the truth.
I very much approved of what we may call the general spirit of these thinkers
- their independence in thinking, their respect for experience and for what
Peirce called “critical commonsensism,” along with their healthy suspicion
of professionalism in philosophy (James was very skeptical about the founding
of the APA). Peirce’s early anti-Cartesian papers seemed to me a necessary
antidote to the artificiality of the method of universal doubt and a number of
other poses that philosophers find dear. As Peirce put it, real doubting is
not the same as saying that you doubt any more than believing is the same as
saying that you believe. Real, as distinct from “paper” doubt, must be
based on reasons and be accompanied by a sense of uneasiness that leads us to
inquire; in short, doubt is not, as it was for Descartes, simply a matter of
will. Likewise, genuine belief is more than saying since it must engender
habits of action and include conviction and willingness to risk. I have often
returned, as a source of inspiration, to Peirce’s insistence that we not
claim to doubt as philosophers what we do not doubt as human beings.
Since there is insufficient space for detail, I shall simply enumerate what I
believe are the signal philosophical contributions made by the classic
American thinkers. First, their thorough critique of the conception of
experience bequeathed to us by the British Empiricists and their
reconstruction of what actual experiencing shows itself to be. Dewey saw most
clearly that the non-empirical view of experience developed by Hume & Co.
failed because it was not an accurate account of experience, but a claim about
what experience must be like if it is to serve as a foundation of knowledge
(for example, provide “sense data” that are certain). Second, the general
critique of Nominalism expressed by Peirce and Dewey (James was too inclined
towards Nominalism) - the error of supposing that only singulars exist, one
result of which is that it becomes impossible to understand what social and
communal existence mean. As Royce put it, one can never understand community
by starting with this individual and then “adding” another and another,
and so on, because community is a distinct type of being and neither a super
individual nor any form of collectivism. Third, their insistence that the
nature of knowing and knowledge must be discovered by attending to the
patterns of inquiry that have led to the knowledge we now have and not to
traditional epistemological discussions aimed at determining whether knowledge
(which often meant metaphysics or philosophy in general) is possible. The
Pragmatists picked up on Hegel’s critique of those who want to “know
before you know” (the same as the youth who wished to learn how to swim
without going into the water) because they saw that this approach postpones
the discussion of first-order philosophical issues due to the supposition that
one cannot join these issues without first knowing whether it is possible to
do so. On the contrary, Dewey advised philosophers to proceed in the spirit of
Hegel expressed in his advice to do what scientists do and just go ahead and
know.
I have written about these and related issues in Purpose and Thought
and in The Spirit of American Philosophy, esp. the revised edition of
1983, and in numerous articles.