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Cheryl Misak, ed. The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 642. ISBN: 978-0-19-921931-5.
The new essays collected in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy are an addition to a growing literature that attempts a philosophical and historical assessment of the aims and achievements of Anglophone philosophy in the twentieth-century. Misak's aim was to gather a collection of essays that together present a relatively unified picture of American philosophy. Misak suggests that such a picture emerges when one strikes a balance between appreciating, on the one hand, the full flavor of America's home-grown philosophy - the pragmatism that originated in the mid to late nineteenth-century in Cambridge, Massachusetts - and avoiding, on the other hand, giving the impression that all philosophical work coming out of America is shot through with a pragmatist spirit (p. v). It is a tribute to Misak's editorial abilities that the twenty-six essays contained in this volume go a long way to realizing this aim.
The essays cover many of the central figures and areas of philosophical inquiry within the American tradition, with precisely half given over to the explication and assessment of those within, or closely associated with, classical pragmatism. The volume has a distinctly historical tinge to it, with well over half the pieces focusing on American philosophy before Quine, and almost all the pieces focusing on what imprint a certain figure or tradition has left on philosophy in America. The essays are mostly introductory pieces, except for Arif Ahmed's "W. V. Quine" which is a more advanced survey, and Bjorn Ramberg's "Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics" that defends an original thesis about Rorty.
In many ways, the two essays that open and close this volume can be read as representative pieces, providing clear presentations of the book's core themes. Roger Ward's "Jonathan Edwards and Eighteenth-Century Religious Philosophy" presents the Calvinist theologian as being something of a forebear to pragmatism; sketching in outline the basic ideas that would soon hit the philosophical world through James, Dewey, and Peirce. Ward argues that Edwards's theology was animated by ideas such as: the importance of inquiry being orientated towards the felt needs of a community; the centrality of holism and experience; the relationship...