post 1

Dan Flood

(a) The American Enlightenment seems to commonly be believed to have begun along side the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Its effects on the emerging Early American Philosophy were numerous and extensively intertwined in its growth. Early American Philosophy was initially rooted in and based upon religious doctrines, and it remained so until it was forced to refocus when other ‘national’ needs were more pressing. Notably, the current philosophers of Europe and their corresponding philosophies heavily influenced American Philosophy as scientific, political, and social ideals were exported to America.

Not only were the settlers, colonialists, and originators of what we know to be this country today seeking a new start, but they were also seeking an opportunity to practice their religious ideals and beliefs apart from constant persecution and attack. The Puritans who first arrived here were not the freedom-focused idealists that many thought them to have been. Many of the tenets that would become the core pieces of American Philosophy were speculated about and introduced by Puritanical thinkers of that time. Men of the early colonial period (i.e. Roger Williams, Jonathan Mayhew, Samuel Johnson, etc.) put forth concepts such as inalienable natural rights, popular sovereignty, and separation of church and state. However, the presence of these tenets in individual philosophies must be viewed as merely insignificant until at least some of them were put into practice.

Consequently, the American Enlightenment was not a time for breaking new ground ideologically. The significance of its role in the future of American Philosophy came in the foresight of the men of the time who embodied and forced the tenets around which the Declaration of Independence and later the Constitution and perhaps more importantly Bill of Rights would be modeled.

The list of significant contributors to the American Enlightenment seems to include everyone from social and political philosophers to politicians, economists, and scientists. The influential philosophers and their works include: Isaac Newton; John Locke, Two Treatises on Government; David Hume; Benjamin Franklin, Account of My Life; Adam Smith; Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence. James Madison / Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers; Frederick Douglass, Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5 1852.

Only later in the American Enlightenment were the ideals of those men acted upon. It was those philosophical tenets, of inalienable natural rights like those to life and property, and to liberty, popular sovereignty, and representative government, which resulted in open rebellion and War against Great Britain, and later in the defense of the Constitution and the creation of the Bill of Rights.

(b) It seems funny to me to try and date the start of American Philosophy when that which we have read seems to indicate that it came about after almost all other philosophies had been introduced and bandied about for quite some time. Nevertheless, the very roots of American Philosophy seem to be based in the Western European Philosophies of the men of the 17th and 18th centuries. Combine those philosophies with the circumstances under which the colonists in the New World were forced to exist and the beginning of that philosophy seems more in reach.

While that may seem to lead to the obvious selection of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, I struggle to endow those men with the title of the first ‘American Philosophers’ when at that point in time, the United States of America was barely recognized and few if any of those people would have considered themselves to have been ‘American.’ Instead I am willing to concede that some of the principles and main tenets which American Philosophy and Pragmatism are centered around originated with those men. They molded those ideals into the structure of a future radically different from that to which they had been previously ruled.

Although many of the tenets of today’s America are embodied in Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, perhaps the most important of those available to us today are those incorporated in the Bill of Rights. The original Constitution did not necessarily speak to the needs of the majority of the people that it was to govern. What could be more fundamental and practical about our nation and its governance then a democratic system of governance by the majority for the benefit of the citizens? The included rights would further protect the citizens against the flaws of a powerful governing body (strikingly similar to the one from which they had just violently separated). Thus, when I look to a specific date, time, place, etc. for its origin I am struck by the appending of the Bill of Rights.

It seems significant to note that given the heavy role of religion in the early stages of American development, the choice to separate church and state and to provide the citizens with a modern, secular state was one that furthered the avenues for American Philosophy in the future. It meant that practical approaches to understanding culture, science, social interaction, and philosophy would be possible one day. It ensured a future for both the fallibility and plurality of the nation’s interests in accordance with pragmatism and meliorism.