At first almost all American thinkers were either theologians or literary writers, such as Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Poe, Twain, etc. But soon enough some of these writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Longfellow blossomed into budding philosophers, such as Longfellow and Thomas Paine. Perhaps its safe to say that philosophy as such began in America with the arrival of “Pragmatism” in the early works of Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914) who actually “invented” the term ‘Pragmatism’ (although his initial term was ‘pragmaticism’) for a philosophy that stressed the importance of empirical results as the basis of all real knowledge.

            Peirce developed theories that stressed the role of empirical experience in determining both meaningfulness and truth. Briefly, Peirce maintained that the meaning of the notion of “meaning” itself must lie in the practical effects of the particular terms in question. For example, the meaning of the term ‘hard’ must be understood in terms of the actual physical effects of the substance in question. Likewise, the truth of our individual beliefs must lie in and be determined by the empirical effects which they predict or imply.

            Although Peirce lived and wrote in relative obscurity, publishing only two articles in “Popular Mechanics Monthly”, his ideas made a lasting impression on William James (1843-1916), the most readily acknowledged founder of Pragmatism. However, James acknowledged his debt to Peirce by seeing to it that he and his family managed to survive on a daily financial basis even though Peirce never held an academic position. James funded him and spoke of his ideas to other thinkers.

            James was a very creative thinker with broad interests in fields such as psychic phenomena and psychology. In fact, he wrote the very first textbook in this latter field under the title “Introduction to Psychology”. James took Peirce’s idea that meaning and truth must be grounded in empirical experience and developed his own theory which came to be known as “Pragmatism”. James always asked “What is the cash value of any idea?”, that is its meaning and the criterion for determining its truth. James spent his academic career at Harvard University and is generally considered to be the founder of American Pragmatist   philosophy. 

            Perhaps the most influential exponent of pragmatist philosophy was John Dewey (1859-1952). Taking James fundamental idea of meaning and truth being a function of empirical experience seriously, Dewey revolutionized and redefined American philosophical thought, both culturally and philosophically. His writings focused on religion, ethics, and especially the philosophy of education. In fact, Dewey revolutionized the whole of the American education system, both in theory and in practice. Departments of education were formed at the Universities of Chicago and Columbia and these two schools produced thousands of teachers taught along the lines of Dewey’s educational ideas.

            Dewey’s main emphasis in educational theory and practice was experience itself. He eschewed abstract learning but emphasized practical learning. He taught that we never really learn anything that has not become a part of our experience. Thus the “Dewey classroom”, and I studied in such a school the third grade through the ninth grade, was one of practical learning. We learned to cook, sew, solder, and dissect animals in Junior High. I was also allowed to print rather than write. My teachers said that when I needed to learn longhand I would. I never did.

            The final and most mature American philosophical thought came from the mind of Alfred North Whitehead, a British transplant from Cambridge who created his own version of what he called “Process Philosophy.” Whitehead focused on the importance of the processes which form our realities, such as bodies, houses, cars, and even socio-political organizations. He saw such groupings as the “actual occasions” out of which our reality is made. For him, events and processes are the real fabric of our worlds, and the physical things we make and discover are simply the residue.

            For instance, this experience we are having right this instant of writing or reading these words is the stuff out of which our reality is made even as we continue along with the words, etc. In a sense, every tenth of a second our world is being re-created as the processes in which we are engaged create fresh ideas and things. Whitehead argued that these processes are the real “stuff” of reality, not the objects created by them. Thus his major book is entitled Process and Reality. In some ways Whitehead’s philosophy is perhaps the most “American” of all of those mentioned so far.

            In recent decades American philosophical thought has pretty much fallen in line with the developments in British philosophy, namely with an emphasis on what is called “Analytic” thought, focusing on the implications of linguistic practice in everyday or “ordinary language”.  This focus has developed from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language presented in his Philosophical Investigations. American philosophy has once again pretty much become a part of British philosophy, focusing on the analysis of language.