Abstract
Although American pragmatism is widely regarded as the distinctive American philosophy, it has never been hegemonic in the academic profession of philosophy. Even during the heyday of James and Dewey, old forms of idealism and new versions of naturalism and realism dominated the major philosophy departments in the country. Moreover, the major followers of James and Dewey tended not to be influential professional philosophers, but rather engaged public philosophers. There indeed were exceptions, most notably Ralph Barton Perry (a realist pupil of James) and C. I. Lewis (a self-styled conceptual pragmatist), both at Harvard. Yet in large measure American pragmatism did not gain a large following in the higher echelons of the academy.
I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America’s own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action.
—John Dewey
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Notes
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Quentin Laver (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). This essay was first published in 1910.
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Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1956). It was first published in 1943.
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© 1989 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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West, C. (1989). The Decline and Resurgence of American Pragmatism: W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty. In: The American Evasion of Philosophy. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20415-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20415-1_6
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