_A much-needed consideration of methodology in comparative philosophy._.

Nineteenth-century Harvard faculty and students looked to philosophical ideas about the proper and effective study of nature as the model of rationality to which their religion must conform. As these ideas changed, notions of rationality changed and so did Harvard religion.

Responding to this issue’s invitation to bring new disciplinary insights to the field of improvement science, this article takes as its starting point one of the field’s guiding metaphors: the imperative to “mind the gap”. Drawing on insights from anthropology, history, and philosophy, the article reflects on the origins and implications of this metaphoric imperative, and suggests some ways in which it might be in tension with the means and ends of improvement. If the industrial origins of improvement science in (...) the twentieth century inform a metaphor of gaps, chasms, and spaces of misalignment as invariably imperfect and potentially dangerous, and therefore requiring bridging or closure, other currents that feed the discipline of improvement science suggest the potential value and uses of spaces of openness and ambiguity. These currents include the science of complex adaptive systems, and certain precepts of philosophical pragmatism acknowledged to inform improvement science. Going a step further, I reflect on whether or not these two contrasting approaches within improvement science should be treated as incommensurable paradigms, and what each approach tells us about the very possibility of accommodating seemingly irreconcilable or incommensurable approaches within improvement science. (shrink)

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University's John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second-generation Columbia naturalists and their students who later joined the department reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel's attempt to build an alliance with (...) the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar's primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either???analytic??? or???Continental??? eclipsed the Columbia philosophers??? normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of???American philosophy??? that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches. (shrink)

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a (...) pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history. (shrink)

In architecture, the concept of Critical Regionalism gained popularity as a synthesis of universal, “modern” elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. Critical Regionalist alternatives are more than a postmodern mix of ethno styles but integrate conceptual qualities like local light, perspective, and tectonic quality into a modern architectural framework. In order to “critically” root architectural works in their corresponding traditions, Critical Regionalists base their conceptual stances on those philosophers that have produced a critical consciousness in European culture like (...) Kant, Ranke, Niebuhr, Humboldt, and others. It must appear as surprising that philosophy, the field from which architectural Critical Regionalism extracted its theoretical foundations, has never developed its own Critical Regionalist tradition. The present article attempts to formulate the relationship between regionalism and philosophy in a different fashion: is it possible and useful to retrospectively use the philosophical insights gained by architectural Critical Regionalism for a definition of the practice of regionalism in contemporary philosophy? (shrink)

This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant during the first three decades of the century. Beginning in (...) the 1930s and 1940s, however, the middle third of the century witnessed the rising influence in America of what would become known as “‘analytic philosophy’,” with its primary roots in Europe: in the Cambridge philosophical analysis of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein; logical empiricism and positivism on the continent; and linguistic analysis and ordinary- language philosophy at Oxford. This overview stresses the persistence of pragmatist themes throughout much of the century, while emphasizing the mid-century transformations that resulted from developments primarily in analytic philosophy. These combined influences resulted at the turn of the millennium in the flourishing, among other developments, of distinctively analytic styles of pragmatism and naturalism. (shrink)