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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Thorstein Veblen - George Herbert Mead - Mary Whiton Calkins Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller |
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Thorstein Bunde Veblen (picture) was born in Valders, Wisconsin on July 30, 1857. He is best known for his book The Theory of The Leisure Class (1899), a classic of social theory that introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption." Veblen received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1884 and taught at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, and the New School for Social Research. Before Veblen turned to the study of social and economic facts and theories, he had concentrated upon philosophy, especially the works of Kant, Comte and Spencer, and, in his later years, the problems of economics remained closely connected in Veblen's mind with fundamental problems of life, civilization and the general theory of science. Intending to integrate political economy into the general movement of science, Veblen discussed the evolution of the scientific point of view, the place of science within the framework of civilization, and the function of evolution within political economy. Although Veblen was strongly impressed by the doctrine of evolution, he was opposed to the simple application of the evolutionary principles to the study of social phenomena. He was also strongly opposed to positivism, and relied more upon German idealism and romanticism. He sometimes flirted with theorists of racialism like Gobineau and H.S. Chamberlin, and, if not influenced by Georges Sorel, he came in his own way very close to the latter's standpoint. Both Sorel and Veblen were inspired by Marx and criticised him by similar arguments. Both were enthusiasts of the idea of promoting industrial production by social political changes. Also, both considered the capitalist unfit to achieve technical progress and they advocated recruitment of industrial leaders from the classes of salaried technicians and workers. Veblen argued that a fundamental conflict exists between the making of goods and the making of money. In The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), he argued that the entrepreneur is a reactionary predator whose perspective is diametrically opposed to that of the engineer or industrialist. Veblen's businessperson makes profits not by providing an outlet for the forces of industrialization and social evolution but by distorting them: by engaging in monetary manipulations, by restricting output to keep prices artificially high, and by interfering with the engineers who actually produce goods and services. The founder of the so-called institutionalist school, Veblen believed that economics must not be studied as a closed system but rather as an aspect of a culture whose customs and habits constitute institutions that are rapidly changing. Veblen's violent attacks on the business class and its ideology have caused violent controversies in America. In Europe Veblen remained nearly unknown. Brought up in a clannish community of immigrants from Norway, Veblen never became completely at ease with the American way of living. He had no talent for teaching, and his academic career was hampered by the troubles of his private life. But his writing, especially his first and principal book Theory of the Leisure Class, had a fermenting effect on economic and social thinking in America. Thorstein Veblen died on August 3, 1929. In The Radical Academy
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George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) George Herbert Mead (picture) was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts on February 27, 1863. He was an important philosopher within the movement of American pragmatism. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1883 and began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard in 1887, graduating in 1888. While at Harvard he studied under the philosophers Josiah Royce and William James. In 1891 Mead married and the same year began teaching at the University of Michigan, where he was a close friend of John Dewey. In 1894 he moved, with Dewey, to the University of Chicago, where he eventually became chairman of the philosophy department. Mead was greatly influenced by Darwinism, but he challenged many of the ideas of the crude behaviorism to which it led. Writing extensively on the theory of time and the nature of reality, he developed a view of emergence and novelty in natural processes. His social psychology, especially his theory of the self, has had a great influence on subsequent psychologists and social scientists. He published relatively little during his lifetime, and large segments of his books are collections from his unfinished manuscripts and his students' notes. Mead published little during his lifetime, and wrote no systematic work, but he was a consistnt thinker. He constantly expressed antipathy for metaphysics and was equally opposed to idealism and materialism. His principal interests were devoted to the investigation of the consequence of biological theories to scientific psychology. He held that psychological phenomena, including those of thinking and knowing, must be described as actions or reactions of the organism that lives in an environment and regulates its relations to objective conditions of life by means of the nervous system of which the brain is a part. To Mead, psychical is the state which occurs when previously formed relations of the organism to its environment break down and new ones are not yet built up. Acts are the unity of existence of the indidivual that is proclaimed as a concrete, inimitable, nonrationalizable unit, but modifiable through its relation to society. Mead tried to maintain a balance between the determination by the individual of the whole, be it society or the world, and the determination by the whole of the individual. After Mead's death, one of his graduate students declared that for many years to come articles and even books would continute to be puslished of which the first author was George Mead. John Dewey, his intimate friend, has said that Mead had "a seminal mind of the first order," and Alfred Whitehead, after reading some of Mead's posthumously published books, publicly endorsed this view. Dewey also recognized that Mead, whose scholarship in the natural sciences was superior to his own, had influenced him by conversations which were continued over a period of years. He died on April 26, 1931. In The Radical Academy
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) Mary Whiton Calkins (picture) was born in Hartford, Connecticut on March 30, 1863. She was an early leader of American psychology. While teaching Greek at Wellesley College, she studied psychology and philosophy at Harvard University, but at that time Harvard would not confer a doctorate upon a woman. Calkins introduced the "paired-associates task" -- a subject, when presented with a stimulus, is asked to provide the appropriate response -- which became a standard tool for studying human learning, and in 1891 she established one of the earliest psychology laboratories in the country at Wellesley. She was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and of the American Philosophical Association in 1918. The creed of Calkins is expressed in four principal statements which are developed in her books: The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1907) and The Good Man and The Good (1918). She proceeded from the conviction that the universe contained distinct mental relities; that although the mind had emerged from a lower level of existence, it no longer belonged to that level, but rather to a new order of existence which had special laws of behavior. These mental realities were ultimately personal; consciousness never occurred impersonally. She defined psychology as a "science of the self as conscious." She also asserted that the universe was throughout mental; that whatever was real was ultimately mental and therefore personal. She concluded that the universe was an all-inclusive Self; an absolute Person; a conscious being. She maintained that philosophy meant metaphysics, which she defined as "the attempt by reasoning to know what is ultimately real." To her, metaphysics did not imply a return to animism, and she stated that it was compatible with the concepts of scientific laws and that reasoning separated metaphysics from mysticism. She was considerably influenced by Royce; opposed logical atomism and instrumentalism. On several problems, she agreed with Samuel Alexander, but claimed a greater consistency. Mary Whiton Calkins died on February 27, 1930. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864-1937) In strong opposition to the Hegelianism prevailing at Oxford University since T.H. Green and strengthened by F.H. Bradley, another professor of that same University, though a namesake of the German idealistic poet Schiller, combated any idealism of German provenience. F.C.S. Schiller (picture) called his philosophy Humanism, while calling himself a disciple of the sophist Protagoras, who said that man is the measure of all things. Schiller proceeds from the statement that all mental life is purposive to the establishment of a concept of truth whose criteria are given by the consequences of a proposition. This does not mean that truth corresponds to the organic or sentimental needs of the knower. As Schiller says, his humanism is merely the perception that the philosophic problem concerns human beings striving to comprehend a world of human experiences by the resources of the human mind. He distinguishes humanism from pragmatism, to which it is in fact akin, by the claim that humanism is of larger range and is able to be applied not only to logic but to ethics, aesthetics, metaphysic and theology, and furthermore by his readiness to acknowledge as many metaphysics as there are tempers, while rejecting any absolute metaphysic. Schiller's principal works about humanism are Humanism (1903) and Studies in Humanism (1907). He wrote also about the problems of the day. In one of his pamphlets he declared that a government of the world administered by international bankers would by no means be the worst possible. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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