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.
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Bridges too low for buses: what did Winner mean by “artifacts have politics”?
In a short article about philosophy of technology I read about a bridge built too low for buses to pass under, so that the people who travel by bus could not easily reach what lay beyond it. The article said a philosopher…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu3 replies -
What are the ‘four principles’ of medical ethics, and what do you do when they conflict?
A drug rep who also teaches a short course mentioned "the four principles" as if everyone knew them, and I nodded and then looked them up: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. I understand each one on its own. My problem is a…
Started by Hetal Shah3 replies -
“When and where I enter”: is Anna Julia Cooper making a claim about knowledge, or about dignity?
My reading circle has started A Voice from the South (1892), and we've been stuck for two weeks on one sentence. Cooper writes that only the Black woman can say, "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my…
Started by Keisha Monroe2 replies -
Filial duty, but whose? In most families I know, the daughter-in-law pays it
In my family, and in almost every family I know, when parents grow old the care is done by a woman who is not their daughter. The son has the duty; the son's wife does the work. Nobody says this out loud.…
Started by Thamarai Raman2 replies -
Vātsyāyana says inquiry works neither on the unknown nor on the settled, only on the doubtful. Is that a rule for seminars too?
I've been translating the opening of Vātsyāyana's commentary on the Nyāya Sūtra for a study circle, and one sentence keeps stopping me. Reasoning, he says, does not operate on something wholly unknown, nor on something already settled, but on something in doubt.…
Started by Meera KulkarniReply first (no replies yet) -
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist turned historian and philosopher of science. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that mature sciences work within paradigms,…
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W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois was an African American sociologist, historian, philosopher and activist, the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard,…
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Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell was an American philosopher who taught at the University of California, Berkeley and for most of his career at Harvard. Drawing on…
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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist who taught at Harvard and wrote widely read essays on natural history. With Niles…
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R. Edward Freeman
R. Edward Freeman is an American philosopher and management theorist, long based at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. His 1984 book…
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Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian literary scholar and media theorist who taught at the University of Toronto. In The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media…
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Matthew Crawford
Matthew Crawford is an American writer and philosopher, with a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, who has been a fellow…
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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago and received the Nobel memorial prize in…
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Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who spent his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded cybernetics, the study of control and…
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John Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist who taught at Princeton and later at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked with…
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Langdon Winner
Langdon Winner is an American political theorist of technology who has taught for many years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In…
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Hayden White
Hayden White was an American historian and theorist of history who taught at Wayne State, Rochester, UCLA, the University of California at Santa Cruz…
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Helen Nissenbaum
Helen Nissenbaum is a philosopher of information technology who has taught at Princeton, New York University and Cornell Tech in New York. She developed…
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Hugh Everett III
Hugh Everett III was an American physicist who, as a doctoral student of John Wheeler at Princeton, proposed the relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics…
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Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1838 and became the most prominent African American abolitionist, orator, editor and writer of…
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Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth Loftus is an American cognitive psychologist who worked at the University of Washington and later the University of California, Irvine. Her experiments on…
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Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-born anthropologist who settled in the United States and built the anthropology department at Columbia University in New York. Through…
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Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan is an American psychologist who taught at Harvard and later at New York University. In a Different Voice challenged Lawrence Kohlberg's stage…
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Claude Shannon
Claude Shannon was an American mathematician and engineer who worked at Bell Labs and later MIT. His 1948 paper 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication'…
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Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist who did fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco and spent much of his career at the Institute for Advanced…
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David Bohm
David Bohm was an American-born theoretical physicist who studied at Berkeley and taught at Princeton before leaving the United States in the McCarthy era;…
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Don Ihde
Don Ihde was an American philosopher who taught for most of his career at Stony Brook University. Building on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he…
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B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner was an American psychologist, for most of his career at Harvard, and the leading proponent of radical behaviourism. He studied how…
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C. S. Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American logician, scientist and philosopher who worked for the US Coast Survey and lectured at Johns Hopkins. He founded…
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Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold was an American forester, ecologist and writer who worked for the US Forest Service in the Southwest and later taught wildlife management…