American Context

Zusammenfassung

Pragmatism is usually referred to as the first original American philosophical tradition, and it is believed to have gradually disappeared from the debate in the 1950s, concomitantly with the rise of logical empiricism and analytic philosophy. As has been observed by many historians of American thought, however, such a description of the role and place of pragmatism in the history of American philosophy is controversial, not to say highly problematic (Gross 2002). Even though it may be legitimate for theoretical purposes – in that it may provide, for instance, a normative account of what American philosophy should be, as well as a normative image of what is truly ›American‹ in the history of American philosophy, thus providing a set of criteria to tell it apart from other, less genuine strains of thought – it is not sound from a strictly historiographical point of view. First of all, even if it is true that pragmatism faded in importance in American philosophy after the 1950s, it is not correct to argue that it did not exert any influence on analytic philosophy. Secondly, as far as its origins are concerned, at the time pragmatism became influential in the American philosophical debate, other traditions of thought were lively and well received among academic circles. As a matter of fact, the rise of pragmatism coincided with the professionalization of philosophy in the United States, but it was not the only factor that prompted such movement towards a higher standard of philosophical clarity and precision; rather the contrary, pragmatism as we know it is largely the outcome of the way in which classical pragmatists engaged with other traditions of thought. The entry will proceed in a chronological order to assess and revise the view of the eclipse of pragmatism in the US-American philosophical debate.