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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Frederick J. E. Woodbridge - William McDougall - William Pepperell Montague Morris R. Cohen - P.W. Bridgman - Horace Meyer Kallen - Clarence Irving Lewis |
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Frederick J. E. Woodbridge (1867-1940) Frederick J. E. Woodbridge (picture) was born in Windsor, Ontario on March 26, 1867. In 1869 his family moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Woodbridge grew up. In 1885 he enrolled at Amherst College where he studied philosophy and religion under Charles Edward Garman. He graduated from Amherst in 1889 and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary to continue his studies. In 1892 he left Union on a traveling fellowship and went to Germany to focus his graduate studies on philosophy at the University of Berlin. He returned to the U.S. in 1894, and took up a teaching position at the University of Minnesota. In 1902 Woodbridge left Minnesota for Columbia University. There, in 1904, he co-founded (with Wendell T. Bush) The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, known since 1921 simply as The Journal of Philosophy. This journal quickly became "...the principle organ through which pragmatism, realism, and naturalism attacked, and eventually overcame, the then dominant philosophical idealism." Woodbridge taught philosophy at Columbia from 1902 until 1912 when he became the university's Dean of the Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science. In 1929 he retired as Dean in order to return to teaching. Woodbridge retired from teaching in 1937, but he continued to edit The Journal of Philosophy until his death in 1940. Woodbridge, one of the attractive and stimulating teachers in the history of American universities, called himself a naive realist. In his later years he was deeply impessed by Santayana's writings which he highly praised and acknowledged as illuminating and enhancing his own undertanding of philosophical and cultural problems. But the basis of his philosophy, such as it is presented in his books The Purpose of History (1916) and The Realm of Mind (1926), was laid before he became acquainted with Santayana's thoughts. The originality of Woodbridge's realism is veiled by his own characterization of his philosophy as "a synthesis of Aristotle and Spinoza, tempered by Locke's empiricism." Woodbridge avoiwed his indebtedness to Aristotle's naturalism and the conception of productivity, and to Spinoza's "rigid insistence on structure," while it was Locke who he said had taught him "fundamentally sound thinking." "Far less acute than Descartes, and far less subtle than Kant, he was far more solid than any of them." But it is taken for granted that Woodbridge, by historically deriving his own thoughts from Aristotle, Spinoza and Locke, had wronged himself. The three philosophers were more influential to him as examples of philosophizing than as transmitters of ideas, and Spinoza and Locke particularly impressed him more as human personalities than as shapers of doctrines. Woodbridge's inquiry into the nature of structure and activity and their relations is the work of an independent thinker. To him, structure determines what is possible, and activity determines what exists. These concepts were elaborated by cautious and flexible analysis of reality as Woodbridge himself saw it. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
McDougall (picture) has called himself "arrogant," and the behaviorists, psychoanalysts, Gestalt psychologists, pragmatists and a host of men of other philosophical and psychological schools attacked by him are far from denying him that quality. Honored as McDougall was as a professor at Oxford and Harvard, he always felt himself living in an adverse intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, he had reason for becoming embittered, for he was aware that his theories were often misrepresented. His work has been discussed from the viewpoint of instinct theory. But, in fact, McDougall regarded the instinctive nature of man only as a foundation, and maintained that the theory of sentiments furnishes the key to his system according to which in the man of developed character very few actions proceed directly from his instinctive foundation. In addition to extensive travels through India, Indonesia and China in order to "hear the East," McDougall prepared his approach to the problems of the human mind by neurological and psychological studies. However, after his Physiological Psychology (1905), he concentrated upon psychological introspection and retrospection. His Introduction to Social Psychology (1908) challenged all previous conceptions and provoked animated controversies. He held that neither instinct, regarded as a working hypothesis, nor the human individual, characterized as an abstraction, can provide the basic data for social psychology but rather molding influences of social environment. The basic fact of human behavior is purposive striving. Consequently, McDougall called psychology hormic, from the Greek horme -- vital impulse, urge to action, which is to him a property of the mind, while he regarded intellect not as a source of energy but as the integrated system of man's beliefs (later as the sum total of man's innate and acquired cognitive abilities). In Body and Mind (1911) McDougall stated that mind must be considered a potent cause of evolution. McDougall also wrote The Group Mind (1920), The Frontiers of Psychology (1936) and The Riddle of Life (1938). In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
William Pepperell Montague (1873-1953) During his childhood, Montague used to bother his parents by questioning them about his soul, the relations between mind and body, and the soul of the universe. He was neither satisfied with his mother's evasive answers, nor terrified by his father's impatience. In his advanced age, Montague declared that he has continued ever since to ask the same questions and that he has not been satisfied by the solutions of the Church or of his teachers, among whom Royce, James, Santayana and Palmer were outstanding, of of his colleagues and critics. However, reared in a New England congregations, he developed "a poignant sense of the beauty of the Christian doctrine." He devoted his life to the reconciliation of his inquiring spirit with his faith, seeking to establish God as the solid basis of natural knowledge. He found that the problem of God is insoluble in terms of traditional theism and traditional atheism but that Man craves infinity, and that higher religion has the best chances of being proved to be true. To him it does not matter whether his philosophy is called a cosmological spiritualism that, in a sense, can be expressed in physical terms, or as spiritualistic, or even animistic, materialism. Montague's metaphysics is founded upon an epistemological realism which he had to defend on more than one front. Against idealism Montague maintains the independence of reality from consciousness. Against pragmatism he adheres to the idealist conception of truth as independent of its working in practice. In 1910 he was associated with the group of "New Realists," but subsequently had to stress the difference of his views from those of the other members of the group and from "objective" and "critical" realism. None of these controversies could weaken his conviction that theism is "an exciting and momentous hypothesis" rather then either a dialectical truism or a dogma to be adopted uncritically. But he declares that religion must claim a knowledge of nature to go beyond what any reasonable person considers a matter of course. To him, religion is concerned with the values in the realm of existence, while philosophy is concerned with the values in the life of the spirit. Philosophy is a vision as religion is a faith. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Morris Raphael Cohen (picture) was born on July 25, 1880, and was a Russian-born philosopher who immigrated at the age of twelve to the United States in 1892 and studied at the City College of New York and Harvard University. He taught at City College (1912-38) and at the University of Chicago (until 1942). A proponent of both rationalism and naturalism, Cohen believed that there is a logical order to the universe independent of any mind, but since the universe also has an irrational aspect, our knowledge of facts is only probable. He considered law as a social system that embodies both the logical use of ideas and continuing reference to facts. His books include Reason and Nature (1931), Law and the Social Order (1933), An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, with Ernest Nagel (1934), A Preface to Logic (1945), The Meaning of Human History (1947), and Reason and Law (1950). Cohen also wrote the introduction to and edited a book about Charles Sanders Peirce entitled Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays by C.S. Peirce, the Founder of Pragmatism (1923), which reintroduced Peirce's work to the American public. Cohen's interest in the philosophy of law and religion dated back to his boyhood, when he was educated in Biblical and Talmudic law and read Maimonides and Judah Halevi's Kuzari. As a young man, he was attracted to Marxian socialism, but his strong belief in democracy helped him to discover other ways of serving the common good and acting in accordance with his social conscience. Felix Adler influenced his approach to ethics; but Cohen was essentially a logician, devoted to mathematical logic and to the investigation of the relationships between science and philosophy. He characterized himself as a realistic rationalist who conceived of reason as "the use of both deductive and inductive inferences working upon the material of experience." He regarded reality as a category that belonged to science, not religion. Cohen died on Janurary 28, 1947. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On The Internet
The American physicist and philosopher of science Percy Williams Bridgman (picture) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 21, 1882. He made major contributions to the physics of high-pressure phenomena. He pursued his entire academic career at Harvard University, obtaining degrees in 1904, 1905, and 1908, and teaching from 1910 until 1954. A skillful experimentalist, Bridgman obtained unprecedented high pressures in his laboratory and published more than 260 articles on his work. He is best known, however, for his 13 books of commonsense logical philosophy, in which he argues that the meaning of any scientific term is expressed best by the operations it conveys. Stricken with an incurable disease, Bridgman committed suicide on August 20, 1961. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974) A unique position in American philosophy is occupied by Horace Meyer Kallen (picture) who resolved not to devote himself to philosophy exclusively, although he held it as his very vocation, although he enjoyed teaching it and was a successful author of a large number of important books. Of all philosophical branches, it is aesthetics that attracts Kallen's highest and most enduring interest. But he has overcome this inclination because he held that active participation in political and economic movements is of greater importance and more urgent. Kallen took a leading part in the defense of civil rights, of freedom of thought and conscience, in advocating the demands of American labor, in the foundation of consumers' cooperatives, and in Jewish affairs, not least in Zionism. In doing so, he sometimes refrained from philosophizing although he did not abandon philosophy. For his always maintained that ideas are events in man's life; whatever else they may be, they certainly form human attitudes, determine the decisions of the individual and give experience its meaning. It is the belief in the power of ideas that supports Kallen's pluralistic views on life and culture. Philosophy should not rely on an exclusive system, but it must confront diverse passions, thoughts, experiences and find their point of junction. This pluralistic view is the basis for Kallen's conception of freedom, the "right to be different," and it has enabled him to clarify the extent and variety of experiencing freedom. In The Liberal Spirit (1948), Kallen not only discussed the content and value of the idea of freedom but also the possibilities of its realization in a human community. In The Education of Free Men (1950) he developed his philosophy of education, refuting totalitarian despotism of any origin. Pluralism prevented Kallen from any oversimplification of philosophical and vital problems. According to Kallen, to deny difficulties and complications is to multiply them, just as to deny reality to evil is to aggravate evil. He holds that the world has not been created for the use and pleasure of mankind, but that Man is capable and, therefore, obliged to improve the world he lives in. Conscious of the fact that vital problems are and remain though and complicated, and that ideals demand hard work and courageous fighting, Kallen need not be afraid that his seriousness may be questioned when he undertakes to harmonize modern science and religion, particularly Judaism, his own faith. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1947) Clarence Irving Lewis (picture), professor of philosophy at Harvard and an outstanding representative of modern philosophical naturalism, has given in A Survey of Symbolic Logic (1918) the most comprehensive and complete exposition of the various systems of symbolic logic, traced from Leibniz to the 20th century, and he has discussed therein the relation of a "system of strict implication" to systems of material implication and to the classical algebra of logic. In Symbolic Logic (1932), Lewis, in collaboration with Cooper Harold Langford, deals systematically with symbolic logic. The conception of consistency between propositions is brought into harmony with mathematical conception. The distinction between the logic of intension and the logic of extension is basic to the discussion of the whole book, in which the plurality of logical truth is maintained. In An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1947), Lewis exposes a naturalistic conception of values by dealing with the relations between the supreme good and Justice. He holds that, for naturalistic ethics, determination of the good must precede the determination of what is right, since the justification of any action depends on the desirability of its contemplated effects. Contrary to many European theorists of values, Lewis characterizes valuation as a type of empirical cognition, not fundamentally different, in what determines their truth or falsity and what determines their validity or justification, from other kinds of empirical knowledge. According to Lewis, for contemporary empiricism, the theory of meaning has the same intimate connection with epistemology that rationalistic or idealistic conceptions previously assigned to metaphysics. Consequently, it has become useless to suppose that the a priori truth, known independently of sense particulars, describes something that is metaphysically relevant to reality. Ethics is the capstone of an edifice that rests upon the theory of meaning. Ethics, epistemology and the theory of meaning are essentially connected. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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