Tradition
American
American philosophy covers thinkers chiefly from the United States, from the pragmatists to writers on race, science, technology and care.
On this site it runs from Frederick Douglass's appeal to natural rights against slavery and the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, to W. E. B. Du Bois on double consciousness and Aldo Leopold's land ethic. Later figures include Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions, Carol Gilligan on care, Stanley Cavell, and scientists and theorists of information and technology such as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and Langdon Winner. Many American philosophers are filed instead under Analytic. It answers questions on truth, meaning, science, race, technology and how to live.
Thinkers in this tradition
- Carol Gilliganb. 1936
- Langdon Winnerb. 1944
- Milton Friedman1912 – 2006
- Norbert Wiener1894 – 1964
- Aldo Leopold1887 – 1948
- B. F. Skinner1904 – 1990
- C. S. Peirce1839 – 1914
- Claude Shannon1916 – 2001
- Clifford Geertz1926 – 2006
- David Bohm1917 – 1992
- Don Ihde1934 – 2024
- Elizabeth Loftusb. 1944
- Franz Boas1858 – 1942
- Frederick Douglass1818 – 1895
Guide: Famous Philosophers: The Great Thinkers of Every Tradition
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Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Reading group: Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, three essays
Sitting in job centres and taking notes, as I often do, I've realised I'm doing amateur ethnography without having read the ethnographers properly, so I'm proposing three essays from Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Week 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
Reading group: William James, The Principles of Psychology, three chapters
William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, after twelve years of work. It is two huge volumes, and nobody should read it straight through. But three chapters are among the best things written about the mind, and they read like…
Started by Dana Whitfield5 replies -
Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I have dipped into parts of it for years, but I've…
Started by Femke Bosman5 replies -
Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side
These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the…
Started by Dana Whitfield6 replies -
Reading group: Gould and Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's paper, published in 1979 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is one of the few biology papers whose title became a philosophical term. Its target is what they called the adaptationist programme: the habit of…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures
James gave the Gifford Lectures here in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and they became The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have walked past the building for decades without reading the book, which seems a poor show for someone who spent his…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Reading group: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), five chapters over five weeks
The Souls of Black Folk is the book I keep pushing onto the philosophy syllabus, because it was doing philosophy all along. Du Bois wrote much of it in my city, at Atlanta University. The ‘Forethought’ announces that the problem of the…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
My students keep asking "but who decides what counts as art?", and I'd like to read the classic papers properly before I try to answer. Join me. Plan (three weeks): Week 1: Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (1956), with…
Started by Keisha Monroe4 replies -
Reading group: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, over four weeks
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is the essay where the phrase "the myth of the given" comes from. It is famous, hard and shorter than its reputation. I would like to read it slowly with whoever is willing. Text. The Harvard…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies