The American Philosopher

The American Philosopher

Synopsis

In this look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's "The American Scholar", this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise, connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of Continental thought. The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and Continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a re-examination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues."