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 basic tenets of “classical” naturalism (exemplified in the work of Mead, Buchler, and Randall, among others) are delineated and distinguished from other versions of naturalism. Classical naturalism is also distinguished from reductive materialism and idealism. Nature is asserted to be indefinitely plural and not amenable to monistic or dualistic categorial schemes; that is, the principle of “ontological parity” is maintained. The method of inquiry of naturalism is outlined, along with the notion of truth as perspectivally objective. The metaphysical hypotheses (...) are then used to examine culture. Culture is found to be the specific environment of human being, arising out of, but irreducible to, other natural processes. Culture is described as the cumulative gestures of the human social organism as it discovers and creates itself in mutual constitution with other natural processes and products. (shrink)

Robert Brandom's book Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism does not incorporate the larger views of any of the “pragmatisms” he deliberately invokes, such as those of the classical American pragmatists, apart from an “analytic” cohort of Wittgenstein-inspired pragmatisms that he himself favors.