21 Facts About American philosophy

American philosophy is the activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophers affiliated with the United States.

American philosophy began to teach the Enlightenment curriculum there, and thus began the American Enlightenment.

American philosophy was interested not only in philosophy and theology, but in theories of education, and in knowledge classification schemes, which he used to write encyclopedias, develop college curricula, and create library classification systems.

Johnson's moral American philosophy was influenced by Descartes and Locke, but more directly by William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated and the idealist philosopher of George Berkeley, with whom Johnson studied while Berkeley was in Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731.

American philosophy was a Presbyterian minister and a delegate who joined the Continental Congress just days before the Declaration was debated.

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When President Witherspoon arrived at the College of New Jersey in 1768, he expanded its natural American philosophy offerings, purged the Berkeley adherents from the faculty, including Jonathan Edwards Jr.

Some revisionist commentators, including Garry Wills' Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, claimed in the 1970s that this imported Scottish American philosophy was the basis for the founding documents of America.

American philosophy was a member of The Metaphysical Club, which was a conversational club of intellectuals that included Chauncey Wright, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Peirce's American philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, both fallibilism and anti-skeptical belief that truth is discoverable and immutable, logic as formal semiotic, Scholastic realism, theism, objective idealism, and belief in the reality of continuity of space, time, and law, and in the reality of absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love as principles operative in the cosmos and as modes of its evolution.

American philosophy then went on to characterize pragmatism as promoting not only a method of clarifying ideas but as endorsing a particular theory of truth.

American philosophy rejected the correspondence theory of truth and instead held that truth involves a belief, facts about the world, other background beliefs, and future consequences of those beliefs.

The 20th century saw the emergence of process American philosophy, itself influenced by the scientific world-view and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

American philosophy held that idealism was an outright contradiction and rejection of common sense.

The core belief of process American philosophy is the claim that events and processes are the principal ontological categories.

Process American philosophy is Heraclitan in the sense that a fundamental ontological category is change.

Many American philosophers contributed to a contemporary "aretaic turn" toward virtue ethics in moral philosophy.

American philosophy is well known for his controversial advocacy of modal realism, the position which holds that there is an infinite number of concrete and causally isolated possible worlds, of which ours is one.

American philosophy is famous for writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most cited academic works of all time.

Analytic philosophers troubled themselves with the abstract and the conceptual, and American philosophy did not fully return to social and political concerns until the 1970s.

American philosophy is responsible for the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, a moral theory first propounded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

American philosophy recommends a return to genuine political communities where individuals can properly acquire their virtues.