[17], Walt Whitman 'marks off the impulsive "I", the natural, existential aspect of the self, from critical sanction. He is responsible for the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, a moral theory first propounded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. This is found in Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods where transcendence is achieved through immersion in nature and the distancing of oneself from society. [3] This includes both knowledge about that environment (including society), but also about who the person is: their sense of self. "[55] He is famous as the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, his monumental tome The Principles of Psychology, and his lecture "The Will to Believe.". [24], Although the Declaration of Independence does contain references to the Creator, the God of Nature, Divine Providence, and the Supreme Judge of the World, the Founding Fathers were not exclusively theistic.

[7] They contained what became known as "The New Learning", including "the works of Locke, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Shakespeare",[8] and other Enlightenment era authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard colleges. Quine, while not a logical positivist, shared their view that philosophy should stand shoulder to shoulder with science in its pursuit of intellectual clarity and understanding of the world. The popular mind was taken with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

Resulting from this were the United States Declaration of Independence, passed in 1776, and the United States Constitution, ratified in 1788. According to Edwards, neither good works nor self-originating faith lead to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God which stands as the sole arbiter of human fortune. This was accompanied by other feminist philosophers, such as Alicia Ostriker and Adrienne Rich. [citation needed] Any other claim, including the claims of ethics, aesthetics, theology, metaphysics, and ontology, are meaningless (this theory is called verificationism). It depends on your college’s program, but some basic classes involve logic, ethics, metaphysics, political … The return to political and social concerns included the popularity of works of Ayn Rand, who promoted ethical egoism (the praxis of the belief system she called Objectivism) in her novels, The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". Common Sense, which has been described as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era",[44] provides justification for the American revolution and independence from the British Crown. William James (1842–1910) was "an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. "[9] 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."[10]. This is evident by the early colonial documents such as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641). From this, Rawls argues for a system of distributive justice in accordance with the Difference Principle, which says that all social and economic inequalities must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Some professed personal concepts of deism, as was characteristic of other European Enlightenment thinkers, such as Maximilien Robespierre, François-Marie Arouet (better known by his pen name, Voltaire), and Rousseau. Santayana was at one point aligned with early 20th-century American proponents of critical realism—such as Roy Wood Sellars—who were also critics of idealism,[63] but Sellars later concluded that Santayana and Charles Augustus Strong were closer to new realism in their emphasis on veridical perception, whereas Sellars and Arthur O. Lovejoy and James Bissett Pratt were more properly counted among the critical realists who emphasized "the distinction between intuition and denotative characterization".[64]. The core belief of process philosophy is the claim that events and processes are the principal ontological categories. Posted Jan 25, 2017

Towards the end of the 20th century there was a resurgence of interest in pragmatism. [96] Dworkin is famous for his theory of law as integrity and legal interpretivism, especially as presented in his book Law's Empire.[97][98]. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. [13], In everyday life, however, 'a complete fusion of the "I" and the "me" may not be a good thing...it is a dynamic sort of balance between the "I" and the "me" that is required'.

Let's begin to examine the beliefs that are polarizing our nation. 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. It was influential in its day: it has been estimated that about half of American college students between 1743 and 1776,[21] and over half of the men who contributed to the Declaration of Independence or debated it[22] were connected to Johnson's American Practical Idealism moral philosophy.