A History of Philosophy in America (review)

490 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey. A Histor>'of Philosophy in America. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Capricorn Books, 1977. Pp. xx + 972. $30.00. The publication of this work fulfills a promissory note issued in 1963 when the authors, both from the University of Pennsylvania, first collaborated on a brief volume for the Union Panamericana, entitled Principales Tendencias de la Filosofia Norteamericana. That earlier volume has grown into this massive exploration of the American philosophical tradition, and a welcome addition to the literature it is. Above all, it is comprehensive, taking the story from the New England Puritans to C. 1. Lewis. But it is comprehensive also in another way, for in its journey from New England to New England, it weaves through all the places in America where philosophy was conducted (from Concord to Virginia to St. Louis to Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard), and to places outside American where significant influences are to be found (to England for Newton, Locke, and Darwin: to Scotland for the realists; to Germany for Hegel; and to France for the physiocrats), and it includes in its journey stops outside philosophy proper, such as institutional changes in higher education and controversies over church polity. Still, this is no survey. As we are told in the introduction, the aim "was rather to do a thick study of a more restricted domain than a thinner study of a more extensive domain" (p. xix). Thus, the major figures--Edwards, Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana. Dewey, and Lewis--receive extended critical treatment in separate chapters with full appreciation of the philosophical difficulties they faced. Nor are compromises made with the complexity of the material: for example, m the chapter on Peirce, he is Introduced through his argument for the claim "all unthought is thought-of," and later in the chapter there ISno hesitation in grappling with the techmcal errors of Petrce's treatment of transfinite cardinals in his argument for real infinitesimals. This is a philosopher's history of philosophy, especially in its extensive consideration of logic. The dominant theme of the book is the interplay between science and religion, while philosophy acted as intermediary. It explores the process of assimilation of Newton (first volume) and of Darwin (second volume). This is an oft-told story. (Although it should be noticed that there are marvelously succinct capsules of the philosophical problems each presented, on paged 61-73 and 525-528, useful even to one not concerned with American philosophy.) But what gives the tale a fresh cast in this book is the central role it gives psychology m the response to Newton. At first sight the most serious challenge of Newton to Puritanism came from the predictability of natural events, damaging to the Puritan doctrine of "special providences." But it was quickly seen that the very order Newton found could be exploited for the purposes of a natural theology. The more profound problems gradually came to be seen to derive from Newton's reliance on unobservables beyond direct experience. And here Locke becomes the key figure, for he was thought to have addressed the eplstemological problems satisfactorily. He had not, but the problems his solution bequeathed set the agenda for American philosophy for the next two centuries. Flower and Murphey believe his enormous influence was due in large part to his "'magnificent ambiguities," which foreclosed few options to his successors, leading at the same time to materialism, idealism, and realism. On the Amerlcan stage each of these Lockean options was played out; but the most influential interpretation of Locke in America was a realist one which read his Essay as a psychology, as "a scientific account of how, not as a justification of what, we know" (p. xiv). This reading of Locke, as a realist and as a psychologist, was reinforced for the Americans by what Flower and Murphey consider the second dominant paradigm in American philosophy, after PuritanIsm , namely, Scottish common-sense realism This claim constitutes the most distinctwe contribution of this book, and the chapters that undertake it are, I believe, the core of the book. They propose an important historical and philosophical thesis which should cause us...