American philosophy is philosophy produced by American people in the United States of America, part of American culture. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while it lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and shaping collective American identity over the history of the nation"."American philosophy" at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved on May 24, 2009 New England colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (today known as Ivy Leagues) have long been influential in producing American philosophy.
Early American philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries is largely seen as an extension of the European Enlightenment. Colonial America and the American Enlightenment was influenced by the Puritan thought of Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards. The Enlightenment also influenced the philosophy of the American Revolution and Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
A small number of 19th century philosophies are known as uniquely American in origin, namely pragmatism and transcendentalism, with their most prominent proponents being the philosophers William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson respectively.
American philosophy since the 20th century is mostly analytic philosophy. Some of the most prominent American analytic philosophers are W. V. O. Quine and Saul Kripke.
17th century While various Indian tribes (see Indigenous American philosophy) inhabited the territories that would later become the United States, most histories of the American philosophy have traditionally begun with European colonization, especially with the arrival of the English Puritans in New England, such as those aboard the Mayflower who established Plymouth Colony.
Settlement Governing documents for the newly established settlements in the American Colonies such as the Mayflower Compact (1620), Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) expressed Puritan Providentialism, emphasizing the relationship between God, the individual, and the community.
America's first university was Harvard College, established in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636.Roger L. Geiger, ''The History of American Higher Education'' (2014) [https://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10320.pdf pp 1-8 online] The first 100 years or so of college education in the American Colonies were dominated by the Puritan theology of William Ames and "the sixteenth-century logical methods of Petrus Ramus."Ahlstrom, Sydney Eckman, A Religious History of the American People, Yale University Press, 1972, p. 295
Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop (1588–1649) emphasized the public life over the private. Others, such as Rhode Island co-founder Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683), held that religious tolerance was more integral than trying to achieve religious homogeneity in a community."Religious Tolerance" – Freedom: A History of US: PBS.com Retrieved September 9, 2009
Antinomian Controversy Minister John Cotton (1585–1652) influenced Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), a participant in the Antinomian Controversy which disrupted Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Hutchinson was put on trial for preferring a covenant of grace to a covenant of works. With encouragement from Roger Williams, Hutchinson and supporters like John Clarke (1609–1676) and William Coddington (c 1601–1678) fled and established Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Salem witch trials
Robert Calef (1648–1719) wrote More Wonders of the Invisible World (1698) denouncing the recent Salem witch trials (1692–1693), conducted by Sheriff George Corwin, grandson of Connecticut governor John Winthrop the Younger. As well as fourteen women and five men executed by hanging, Giles Corey was accused of wizardry and killed by pressing from the torture of peine forte et dure.
Calef especially criticized Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who had defended his actions in Wonders of the Invisible World (1693).Wilson, L. L. (1997). The Salem Witch Trials. United Kingdom: Lerner Publishing Company. p. 53 Mather was an early proponent of smallpox inoculation, and deeply influenced by the British natural philosophy (or science) of Isaac Newton and Newtonianism.Brasch, Frederick E. "The Newtonian Epoch in the American Colonies (1680–1783)." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 49, no. 2 (1939): 314–332. Mather worked on a grand intellectual project he titled Biblia Americana, a commentary and interpretation of the Bible in light of "all of the Learning in the World". Mather influenced Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), particularly with his book on Christian duty Essays to Do Good (1710).Whitman, J. (1993). Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards: Philosophy, Science, and Puritan Theology. (n.p.): Indiana University.
18th century
Yale University was founded in Connecticut in 1701 by a group of Harvard alumni who were also Congregationalist clergymen. The 18th century also saw the introduction of modern philosophy, natural philosophy, and the Enlightenment to colonial America. As a result, Samuel Johnson (1696–1772) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) developed their own American theology and philosophy. "These two brilliant Yale students of those years...exposed the fundamental nature of the problem" of the "incongruities between the old learning and the new."Ahlstrom, p. 296
Both Johnson and Edwards were ordained Congregationalist minister; but Edwards based his reformed Puritan theology on Calvinist (or Reformed) doctrine, influencing the Great Awakening, while Johnson converted to the Anglican episcopal religion, and based his new American Enlightenment moral philosophy on natural religion.Hoeveler, J. David, Creating the American Mind:Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges, Rowman & Littlefield, , 2007, p. xi
Both were used "in the tumultuous years of the 1750s and 1770s" to "forge a new intellectual culture for the United States",Hoeveler, p. xii which led to the Founding Fathers' Revolutionary political thought, and the subsequent Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) and Constitution of the United States (1788), including the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing personal freedoms such as speech, religion, press, firearms, assembly, and other natural and legal rights.
Late in the century, the Scottish Enlightenment replaced these philosophies, remaining dominant up to the Civil War.Hoeveler, p. 127
American Enlightenment
In 1714, a donation of 800 books from England, collected by Colonial Agent Jeremiah Dummer (1681–1739), arrived at Yale.Ellis, Joseph J., The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696–1772, Yale University Press, 1973, p. 34 They contained what became known as "The New Learning", including "the works of Locke, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Shakespeare", and other Enlightenment era authors previously unknown to the Puritan universities of Harvard and Yale.
They were first studied by Yale graduate student Samuel Johnson, who also read Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605).The American Historical Review. (1926). United Kingdom: American Historical Association. p. 725 Johnson wrote in his Autobiography, "All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind" and that "he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day."Schneider, Herbert and Carol, Samuel Johnson, President of King's College: His Career and Writings, Columbia University Press, 4 vols., 1929, Volume I, p. 7 He now considered what he had learned at Yale "nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street."Schneider, Volume I, p. 6.
Johnson was appointed tutor at Yale in 1716, starting the American Enlightenment. Samuel Johnson has been called the "Founder of American Philosophy"Walsh, James, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic: Scholasticism in the Colonial Colleges, Fordham University Press, New York, 1925, p. 185 and the "first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there".Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed. Edward Craig, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 124 He was also interested in theories of education and knowledge classification schemes, which he used to write encyclopedias, develop college curricula, and create library classification systems.Fiering, Norman S., "President Samuel Johnson and the Circle of Knowledge", The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr. 1971), pp. 199–236
Johnson believed "the essence of true religion is morality", and "the problem of denominationalism"Fiering, p. 236 could be solved by teaching a non-denominational, common moral philosophy acceptable to all religions. Johnson's moral philosophy was influenced by Descartes and Locke, but more directly by William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), and the subjective idealist and British empiricist, Bishop of Cloyne George Berkeley, with whom Johnson studied while Berkeley was living in Newport, Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731.
Reformed Christianity Jonathan Edwards was "America's most important and original philosophical theologian." Noted for his energetic sermons, such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), credited with starting the First Great Awakening, Edwards emphasized "the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness." Due to Harvard and Yale opposition to the Great Awakening, New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).
Edwards was an associate of George Whitefield and student of Samuel Johnson, who transmitted the influence of Bishop Berkeley. Edwards united a Christian Platonism with an empiricist epistemology, with the aid of British empiricist John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Newtonian physics.Chai, L., Leon Chai Professor of English and Comparative Literature University of Illinois, U. (1998). Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, USA. p. 56
For Edwards, there is an immaterial mind consisting of understanding and will, and understanding leads to his fundamental notion of Resistance, which gives any object its properties. Resistance is the exertion of God's power, and can be seen in Newton's laws of motion, where an object is "unwilling" to change its current state, whether in motion or at rest.Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy p. 63
Though Edwards revised Puritan theology using Enlightenment ideas from Berkeley, Locke, and Newton, he remained a Reformed Christian and hard determinist believing in predestination. He rejected freedom of the will, believing we can do as we please, but we cannot please as we please.Berger, A. A. (2015). Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising's Impact on American Character and Society. United States: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 91 According to Edwards, neither good works nor self-originating faith leads to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God which is the sole arbiter of human fortune.Simonson, H. P. (2009). Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart. United States: Wipf & Stock Publishers. p. 140
American Practical Idealism