Η επίδραση της ελληνικής φιλοσοφίας στην Αμερική
ένα αφιέρωμα στον μεγάλο Έλληνα Φιλόσοφο Ιωάννη Αντωνόπουλο (κατά κόσμον John Anton)
101 χρόνια από την γέννησή του (02/11/1920)
Published in American Philosophy, an Encyclopedia.
Eds. J. Lachs and R. Talisse. New
York: Rutledge, 2008, pp. 340-46.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY,
INFLUENCE OF.
[340, col. 1] The case of the influence
of Greek philosophy in America
is somewhat similar to that of the European Enlightenment in selecting strands
of classical thought relevant to current cultural interests. In general, the
classical tradition in America,
less conspicuous during the Colonial period, grew more appreciative and useful
in the decades preceding and during the revolutionary years. After the
mid-point of the nineteenth century, when philosophy became an independent academic
discipline, Greek philosophy gradually gained recognition with the rise in the
universities of different philosophical trends and especially with the
development of American Pragmatism. However, the question of influence has to
be treated with a note of reservation. Gradual assimilation of select ideas
borrowed from the classical philosophy had a slow start, almost hardly noticeable
during the first three centuries of the new nation. The more positive—“creative”
might be a better word—phase became manifest at the end of the nineteenth
century and continued through the first half of the twentieth and later under a
different guise. More precisely, the [340, col. 2] question of influence in the
sense of being a factor in the way that philosophy was taught and written in
America remains a controversial, if not debatable theme.
Colonial period
The place of Greek
philosophy in the communities of faith in the early life of the Colonies was
restricted to the education of the seminarians and mainly as preparation to Biblical
studies and learning New Testament Greek. Before proceeding with issues of
influence, a distinction is needed between usefulness of the classics in the Colonies
and the limited interest in philosophical ideas. On the whole, philosophy as a
systematic discipline was not cultivated in colonial America although the classics were
taught in the established schools. The early interest in Greek subjects was
limited mainly to the language and to a lesser extent to rhetoric and poetry,
usually imported by scholars educated in England. Smatterings of
philosophical ideas, when considered acceptable to the religious culture in the
Colonies, only occasionally found a serious place in the mainstream of the
values the Puritans held. Whatever presence such ideas enjoyed is better
understood as limited extensions of the English response to the European
renaissance movement. Classical political philosophy, for instance, became an
object of interest in the pre-Revolutionary period, mainly in the modern form it
took through the writings of Cicero and Seneca.
A distinction can be made between the
modes of responding to the classical tradition that mark the earlier period on
the one hand and the transition to the responses, on the other, that
characterize the second half of the eighteenth century and after. The
intellectuals in both periods proved quite eclectic in what they found in the classics
as useful to their cultural, religious and political needs. The dominant
religious interests in the Colonies exercised considerable restraints over what
could be beneficial to the believers and contribute to stabilizing their faith.
Whatever of the classical tradition was successfully absorbed after the middle
of the eighteenth century was actually limited to the features of the European Enlightenment
that helped promote new political ideas. Aristotle’s social thought, for
instance, was read only in the way it was accepted in the writings of Locke.
Platonism, on the other hand, found its place in Puritanism through the
seventeenth century Christian Platonists of Cambridge University, Benjamin
Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and [341, col. 1] others. In sharp
contrast, the Americans while using the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists to
accommodate religious interests, made no scholarly attempt to study Plato
himself apart from their puritan credo.
A note of caution is perhaps needed
at this point. Whatever was absorbed
from the classical tradition during that period and later had already undergone
serious changes during the late Hellenistic and Roman periods of intellectual
history, and the end result was that the classical tradition in general became
available to modern times primarily in Roman dress. This historical change is
particularly important to understanding the limited presence of Greek
philosophy in America
during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The same reservation holds true
for the reception of other features of the classics, from language and rhetoric
to poetry and architecture. With regard to philosophy, the Greek thinkers that eventually
held the interest of American intellectuals were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,
and to a lesser degree the Stoics and the Epicureans. Again the preference for
special classical philosophers differs from one period of American thought to
another. For instance, the works of Aristotle during the colonial period were
virtually ignored and not solely because of lack of texts and translations, in
contrast to the influence that Greek philosophy was exerting in England.
Viewed in retrospect, the
cultivation of the Classics in the Colonies played a significant albeit
inadvertent role in the intellectual preparation of the political outlook of the
Revolution, although initially such a role was not intended. Once the Colonies
passed the initial phase of settlement and communities were made adequately
secure, the educational needs led to gradual enrichment for the cultural
advancement beyond the outlook of the frontier fighter. The nine
pre-Revolutionary colleges, mainly educational institutions for men, required
all entering students to be trained in Greek and Latin. In New England the
Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, contributed largely to this preparation,
and Harvard College, founded in the next year, added in 1723 to its curriculum,
besides Greek, Latin and Hebrew, courses in logic, ethics and metaphysics. Princeton, closer to a classical curriculum than Harvard,
taught philosophy in the second year and moral philosophy in the third; added
to these were lectures on Aristotle’s theory of the mixed form of government.
In various combinations of courses the same pattern was followed in the curricula
of other sprouting colleges, from William and Mary to Cornell and Yale. [341,
col. 2] Adding to the quality of teaching was the continuous exchange of
students between the Colonies and England in addition to the influx
of teachers from the standard institutions of Cambridge and Oxford and ones in Scotland. Stated in another way, philosophy
in the Colonies was not a special preoccupation of teaching in the colleges. In
the popular use of the term, “philosophizing” as an activity was also pursued
in the other walks of life, from the farmers and the clergy to the holders of
office in the governing of the land. Whatever the agent, the wisdom sought
after was not an original system but a personal account of lively affairs meant
to throw light on events of the affairs of public life in an environment of
constant expansion and novel opportunities.
The importation of ideas from Europe, especially from England played a significant role
in the area of practical thinking, especially as these ideas had an impact on
the already highly organized religious communities. While it may be incorrect to
speak of a “philosophy” of the Puritans or of other religious groups, it would
be correct to speak of the use of philosophical ideas for the elucidation of
their religious commitment. Basically, in all religious congregations, the
faithful members exhibited unquestionable confidence in the unshakable truth of
their beliefs and their ultimate dependence on the providence God had granted
to humanity.
Philosophy as a subject matter,
however, was mainly taught in the courses of colleges but in a somewhat different
way than as ideas in support of the beliefs held by the religious communities. A
special feature of Protestant thought related to the classical tradition was
the religious individualism whereby the salvation took the form of personal
attainment. This was an important feature as it entered the set of beliefs that
proved influential for the political developments in the next century. It was a
type of individualism that gained further support when it was combined with the
doctrines of John Locke. The Puritans, through their adherence to Calvinism,
expected the lessening of the impact of individualism to prevent heresies. But
it was not a philosophy of individualism as it was an extension of their
theology of revelation in the sacred confirmation of faith. What might have
been an unacknowledged indebtedness to Greek philosophy, namely the place of
reason in community life, was accepted only as a principle to confirm the truths
of faith, as in the case of God’s covenant with human beings. The religious
employment of reason asserted the acceptance of human knowledge primarily as
knowledge of nature to show its harmonious connectedness with [342, col. 1] the
Will of God and the divine rule. This blending of faith and reason,
non-Hellenic is essence, once again brought reason under the dictates of
religion, re-asserting the medieval priorities, which was another way of
accepting not philosophy but the faculty of reason within the frame of
religious faith. To be sure, the individualism that sprouted under the cover of
Protestantism was quickly tempered by the religious community to prevent
misinterpretations of the biblical truth.
Interest in science was accepted as
the study of God’s work. However, no significant contribution was made to
science. Locke’s theory of knowledge made inroads in the outlook of the
Puritans just as did Newton’s
work as “natural philosophy,” not physics. Both thinkers were contemporaries:
John Locke (1632-1704), Isaak Newton (1642-1727). Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding published in 1690 soon found
its way to New England. Jonathan Edwards read
it at the age of fourteen in 1717. In 1695 Locke published his The Reasonableness of Christianity in which
he claimed that Christianity deriving as it does its teachings from biblical
sources contains nothing contrary to reason, thus making it the most reasonable
institution for the benefit of humanity.
Equally appealing was Locke’s theory of tabula rasa, a doctrine he nowhere admitted as having its original
source in Aristotle. Jonathan Edwards absorbed in his own way Locke’s views and
formed his theological outlook by bringing it in line with his Neoplatonism as
a Trinitarian theology while leaning on a reconstruction of Ramus.
Greek philosophy began to make its presence
felt in the decades before the Revolution. It made its appearance within the set
of the political ideas of the Enlightenment. Classical models of freedom and
constitutional rights were made stronger through the study of antiquity.
However, no systematic study of either Plato or Aristotle was done in
preparation for the impending social change. American leaders, when they
referred to the ancients, did so by way of prudence and common sense rather
than a carefully phrased new political philosophy. When the American
Philosophical Society was founded in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin being one of
its founders, its purpose was to promote “Useful Knowledge.” Besides exchanging
information by “physicians, botanists, mathematicians, chemists,” the clause
stating the inclusion of “a natural philosopher” had nothing to do with Greek
philosophy. The same was true of a similar society founded in 1748 in Charleston, S.C.
During this phase an emigrant Presbyterian
minister, James Wilson, with a love for Aristotle, [342, col. 2] and James
March, a professor at the University
of Vermont, who taught
Plato, Aristotle and Kant, did much to keep Greek philosophy alive.
American Revolution
Locke’s theory of
natural rights was far more influential in America than any aspect of Greek
political thought, Platonic or Aristotelian. The classical conception of
political government exerted only a mild appeal. Actually it was Cicero’s conception of
government that influenced the Americans. This conception had already been
influential in Locke’s thought. Francis Bacon and John Locke were the two
thinkers who instructed the Americans what to value in Greek political
philosophers. Bacon and Locke were convinced that everything of value in
classicism had already been revived, a view the Americans readily accepted
while articulating the “practical” wisdom of happiness including the “pursuit
power” (Hamilton)
and “the taming of power” (Madison).
Jefferson thought about happiness as “a
dynamic balance between power and morals” (Koch 1961: 22). The more certain the
Americans became of their political success in forming a constitution of
states, the more independent they felt from ties to historical traditions. They
had not “suffered a blind veneration for antiquity” (Madison). Actually, the founding fathers
reached back to Athens
via Rome by
adopting the political ideal of Cicero’s
concordia, not Aristotle’s homonoia. Intentionally left out of the
revival of classical ideas were the ethical doctrines of Plato and Aristotle,
which explains the vagueness that was allowed to linger in the part of the
Declaration of Independence that stated “the Pursuit of Happiness” as an unalienable
Right, endowed by the Creator. In fact, no theoretical foundation was provided to
specify the precise meaning of happiness. Jefferson
appealed to “common sense” rather than consult what the Greek philosophers had
to say about the theory of happiness as eudaimonia
in its ethical and political context. Thus, the use of the idea of happiness in
the literature of the period as a Right remained undefined while it continued to
suit the pursuit of the new freedom and whatever fruits it could yield. John
Adams came closest to the Greek view as he mixed his borrowing from Locke and
Aristotle to conjoin his ideas of power and morals. In preferring monarchy to
aristocracy he conveniently distorted his Aristotle to fit the
Lockean-Hobbesian view of the common good. Briefly stated, the American leaders
put definite limits to the wider use of the political wisdom of [343, col. 1] classical
humanism. In their view, ancient democracy had certain merits but could not
adequately serve the goals of the Revolution, as Jefferson
admitted in a letter to Isaak Tiffany written in 1816 that representative
democracy made every political structure, including Aristotle’s Politics, “almost useless.” The eclectic
approach to Greek political philosophy should not be overlooked although Thomas
Paine did not hesitate to declare that he saw no reason why Americans should go
“two thousand years back for lessons and examples. In a comparable vein, John
Taylor of Virginia
insisted that the political perfection of the Greek government and thought was
irrelevant to America.
The distance between the “present” and the “tradition” increased after the
early post-revolution era only to be gradually modified after the middle of the
nineteenth century.
Nineteenth century and the rise of academic philosophy.
Two movements
around the middle of the nineteenth century deserve mention for their efforts
to relate to the study of Greek philosophy and its pertinence to the intellectual
life of the new nation: the Hegelian movement of St. Louis that led to the programs of the
Concord Summer School of Philosophy, and the Transcendentalists of New England.
Much in these new trends was due to an encounter with German philosophy and the
advanced classical scholarship of the German universities as the latter
continued during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early ones of
the twentieth.
The Transcendentalists’ criticism of
utilitarianism and their attack on commercialism bear no relation to the type
of Platonism they espoused. As a movement, Transcendentalism is best understood
as a different expansion of idealism vacillating between a reasonable theology
and philosophical inspiration. As such, its post-revolutionary stance aimed at
strengthening the confidence in the new freedom for the spiritual gains of the
common citizens. It may be said that it was an offspring of the Romantic Movement,
but with a twist of its own. What is of special interest about its role as an
intellectual attitude is the way it understood a connection between the Kantian
theory of pure reason and a special interpretation of Plato. Although
Transcendentalism did not succeed nor did it try to become a technical
philosophy, it attracted followers who thought that with its help they could discern
the continuity from the rationalized faith of Jonathan Edwards’ puritanism to [343,
col. 2] Emerson’s way of receiving in the soul’s reason the flow of the divine.
Emerson was confident in his effort to blend into a harmonious unity the
Bhagavad-Gita and the Platonism of Plotinus in a vision of idealism that would
provide the democratic individual with a solid basis for rational faith and a
new universality. Once again, the movement, dominated as it was by the
metaphysics of Kant, as siphoned through Coleridge, had only limited room for
Greek philosophy beyond what Plotinus’ Plato could render appealing. Emerson
could hold Plato and Plutarch in high esteem, yet the ancients never occupied a
respectable place in the foreground of his thinking or his goals anymore than
did the recent growth of the experimental science of nature. Still, Emerson set
the tone for the transcendental understanding of progress as advancing humanity
to a higher plateau of freedom, beyond nature, history and science. In the
closing part of his famous “The American Scholar” address he confidently
exclaimed: “in yourself slumbers the whole Reason; it is for you to know all;
it is for you to dare all.” The Greeks remained luminaries in the background, a
view that had already become firmly established in the American intellectual outlook.
The other movement, the Hegelianism
of the Philosophical Society of St. Louis, established formally in1866, worked
out a different philosophical program. Its members launched the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and
while advocating German Idealism, the group also promoted the serious study of
Aristotle. Two of its members, Denton J. Snider and Hiram K. Jones, organized a
“Plato Club.” Another group created in 1879 the Concord School of Philosophy. It
included W. T. Harris, A Bronson Alcott and Thomas Davidson, who abandoned
Hegel in favor of Aristotle. Among the younger teachers who lectured at the Concord School was John Dewey. It can be argued
that it was the vigorous and open philosophizing of these thinkers that broke
the rigid pattern of text-book teaching, mainly by ministers at the colleges. The
activities of this group should be credited with alerting the younger
generation of students to the outstanding work of the university professors at
the leading universities of Germany,
France
and England
that were doing advanced research in classical philology and philosophy. The
influence of the Greek philosophy in America was in large measure due to
the fresh interpretations of the Greek mind in Europe.
While we cannot speak of a direct Greek influence in the case of the St. Louis thinkers, their way
of pursuing philosophy left its mark on the next generation.
[344, col. 1] The contributions of classical
philology during the second half of the nineteenth century were due to American
scholars who had studied in German Universities. Lane B. L. Gildersleeve and others
received their doctorates from Göttingen, and so did M.W. Humphies, H. W. Smyth,
and Paul Shorey during the 1880s. Their work was strictly methodical and
scientific with no explicit concern for the development of a new cultural character.
As such, ethical philosophy was left outside the scope of philological
research. In his Presidential Address “The Province of the American
Philologist” before the American Philological Association in 1878, Gildersleeve
outlined its goals as dealing with the texts and aiming at understanding the
wisdom of the ancients. The evaluation of the ancient wisdom was better left to
those philosophers who were qualified to meet the demands of the task. The
volumes of the American Journal of
Philology from1880-1919 provide a fair picture of the limited interest of
the philologists in philosophy. In fact their interest deepened after the
philosophers had made Greek thought a respected field of studies. The Platonic
studies of Paul Shorey are an exception, as are those of Harold Cherniss in
later years. Both had responded to the philosophy of humanistic values of the
Greeks and were followed by the contributions of F. Solmsen and Philip Merlan, also
in the twentieth century.
Parallel to the philological studies was another encounter with
German philosophy during the second half of the nineteenth century, contributing
to a trend that coincided with the establishing of graduate studies in American
universities. A number of gifted American students went to Germany, among them Josiah
Royce, who after receiving his B. A. in 1875 with a graduation thesis on “The
Theology of Aeschylus’ Prometheus,”
immediately went to Germany to study philosophy for two years. Upon returning,
he went to Johns Hopkins and received his PhD in 1878. Greek philosophy,
however, remained peripheral to his religious idealism. Others who went to Germany
were G. S. Morris from Johns Hopkins, G. Santayana from Harvard, and F.J.K. Woodbridge
from Columbia, They
were deeply affected by the new interpretations of Plato and Aristotle. Upon
his return, Morris brought back with him an Aristotle radically different from
that of the scholastic version. Developed as a dynamic idealist, Morris following
the model of his teacher F. Trendelenburg, It was Morris who later influenced
John Dewey to modify his Hegelianism in favor of Aristotle, a move that was
reinforced through Dewey’s association with Woodbridge at Columbia.
Twentieth century [344,
col. 2]
A preliminary note
is needed on the extent and power of “influence.” What happened in the
twentieth century is not much different from what took place early in the
intellectual history of America.
For instance, the philosophical trends that reached America from Cambridge and Oxford, or Paris, Berlin
and Heidelberg,
were conveniently absorbed in revised form through critical reconstruction and
adjustment to the American established needs. As importations, the currents of
value theory, existentialism, phenomenology and other winds of doctrine, were
influential but not converting forces. In a similar way, though not as powerful
as in the past century, the same mode of receiving the currents of English and
European trends, continued. The influx of the classical tradition and
especially Greek philosophy, rather than being a catalytic force, generated a
creative response that at best may be called one of creative accommodation. In
this respect, the power of influence bears the signs of a mild effect rather
than a revolutionary beginning in a new direction. The Greek philosophers were
available to whatever purposes the American intellectuals thought proper. The
“living” past entered the scene mainly as a fertile reservoir of ideas than a relevant
“present” doctrine. In this sense, the mild acceptance of Greek philosophy is
better viewed in the fashion in which the trends of rationalism and empiricism
were treated in the nineteenth century.
Of all the new philosophical
currents in the late nineteenth century, it was the naturalistic side of
Pragmatism that made extensive use of Greek philosophy, Aristotle in
particular, and felt a strong attraction to it. The affinity can be explained
as resulting from the naturalistic strand that soon was to become the dominant
feature of Pragmatism. The early Santayana and the mature Woodbridge are the two American philosophers
who came close to building their work in response to Aristotle. Dewey, although
a leading pragmatist, was freely using the Aristotelian tradition together with
the Socratic dialectic within the spirit of his naturalistic humanism. In all
three cases we see an adjustment of Aristotle’s most usable principles to the
contemporary cultural and theoretical problems. If we can speak of “influence,”
we find it here in the most creative features of the school.
Santayana, who taught courses on
Plato and Aristotle at Harvard, was the first to present a defense and espouse advocacy
of Greek philosophy as a rational mode of life in the five volumes of his The Life of Reason (1905-1906). The work
was [345, col. 1] inspired by a blending Hegelian phenomenology and Plato with
Aristotelian ethics and aimed to project the full story of the progress of the
human mind. Still, Santayana’s intellectual position owed more to James’ Principles of Psychology than to
Aristotle’s De Anima. It was the
closest any American thinker had ever come to understanding the naturalism of
the Greeks, especially at a time, as he stated, when “the philosophical and
political departments at Harvard had not yet discovered Plato and Aristotle.” Woodbridge, after studying
with Paulsen in Germany,
returned to America
and used Aristotle’s ontology to liberate his thinking from the last strains of
idealism. Like Santayana but more persistently, he contributed largely to the
study of Greek philosophy as the reliable model for the new naturalism. Still, Woodbridge’s indebtedness
was not only to the ancients but also to Spinoza, Locke and Santayana. Although
neither he nor Santayana were members of the emerging Pragmatism, both helped
build the bridge that made Greek thought understandable
to students working on either side of Pragmatism. Their work was continued by the
students who wrote dissertations at Columbia, among them Herbert W. Schneider,
John Herman Randall, Jr., Sterling Lambrecht, Richard McKeon, Irwin Edman, and
A. Edel.
John Dewey’s affinity to Greek
philosophy was a blend of critical reservations and fruitful engagement. He
borrowed an expression from T. Veblen to characterize the Greek epistemology as
being a case of the “spectator’s theory of knowledge.” At the same time he came
closer to the Greek view of philosophy as a way of life, a thesis he was
eventually to posit within the context of social life. Dewey brought philosophy
under the banner of democracy. Actually, of all the pragmatists it was Dewey
who succeeded in making use of the Greeks while trying to transform the
educational norms through the rational understanding of the changing cultural
conditions. Dewey’s instrumentalism prevented him from appreciating the Greek
view of reason in the full meaning of its humanistic value. But like the
Greeks, he still sought to transform experience and raise it to a heightened
understanding of the pressing problems of life. His response to Plato took the
form of an urgent recommendation to adopt the Socratic command for relentless
inquiry without the dualism of the Platonic theory of transcendent Forms. Dewey
found it impossible to accept what he believed was the Greek confidence in
ultimate values. As a result he dismissed this essential part of the philosophy
of the Greeks at the critical turning point of his [345, col. 2] own thinking.
It was this view he passed on to the next generation of naturalists, some of
whom wrote sustained works on Greek philosophy. Dewey wrote none; Woodbridge wrote at least
two, among them The Son of Apollo
(1929), which delighted Dewey and irritated Paul Shorey.
By the middle of the twentieth
century the scholarly interest in the ancient Greeks had reached a high plateau
of productivity. A great number of books and articles had been published
expounding on select themes and offering full treatments of the philosophies of
the ancients. However, it is difficult to speak of Greek influence in the mode
of philosophizing of the Americans comparable to the way Descartes, Locke,
Hume, Kant, and Hegel had exerted. Critical studies of Greek philosophy
abounded, but few tried to place the Greeks within the scope of their own
intellectual loyalties, as did P. E. More, for instance in the case of Plato.
Far more interesting proved the historical approach of Dewey’s student, John
Herman Randall, Jr. who as a leading historian of philosophy wrote books on
Plato, Aristotle, also the Hellenistic thinkers by applying the principles of
his naturalistic cultural relativism. What distinguishes Randall’s reading of
the ancients is an open and critical discussion on the role of the ancient
philosophers in effecting changes in ideas, methods and objectives. The
results, though not generally accepted, were nevertheless illuminating as, for
instance his seeing Plato’s theory of Forms as imaginative perfections, or
Aristotle’s ethical excellences as special cultural responses to changing
conditions. Randall himself remained confident that he understood both Dewey
and Aristotle while deepening the historical evaluation of their contributions.
Much different were the studies on ancient philosophers that R. Demos, R.
McKeon, A. Edel, M. Greene, J. Owens, John Wild, R. Brumbaugh, Charles Kahn, Reginald
Allen, and others worked out, always seeking to come close to the substance of
the original.
A cross between philosophy,
philology and analysis began by the mid-point of the twentieth century with the
creation of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy in 1954 with G. Vlastos as
its first president. Vlastos’ publications on Plato and the Presocratics bear
the marks of the application of the analytical tools to the evaluation of
philosophical arguments in the philosophical texts of the Greeks. The
analytical movement succeeded mainly as an interpretive undertaking rather than
one seeking to reach beyond the perimeter of professional expertise. On the
other hand, the cultural impact the pragmatic naturalists sought to bring [346,
col. 1] gradually lessened during the latter part of the twentieth century. The
only exception seems to be the approach of the existentialists deriving from
their study of Nietzsche a different intensity to reach the mind of the ancient
thinkers of Greece,
poets as well as philosophers.
Understanding philosophy as a way of
life was a Greek achievement and grew out of the conditions of that particular cultural
setting. The primacy their philosophy assigned to reason survived in a variety
of ways after the decline of the classical world. They viewed philosophy as the
pursuit of wisdom, at once a personal affair and a political concern. Still, it
was reason as the method the Greeks had developed for the pursuit of wisdom,
including science, which proved adjustable. As a distinct “way of life,”
however, the original conception of philosophy remained non-transferable to
alien conditions. Thus, recasting the methods of philosophy did not entail the
incorporation of the original Greek “way of life” despite efforts to claim its
applicability and relevance. The meaning of “influence” in the case of American
philosophy calls for special evaluation when discussing the continuous interest
in the study of ancient thought. The closest, it seems, the American thinkers
came to being influenced by the Greek philosophers were initially certain
members of the St. Louis Hegelians and the naturalistic pragmatists in their
attempts to see philosophy as a way of life. Both were cases of imitations of a
model that did not aim at bringing about wider public acceptance. The Greeks
have been studied, often very seriously, but more often than not without any
explicit intent to grant their “way of life” a leading role of substantive
influence in culture.
Postscript
A complete picture
of the place of Greek philosophy and its role in the development of American thought
is still a vast subject for investigation. Without such a close study it is
difficult to specify with precision what may be called, even in a loose sense,
“influence.” Be that as it may, the academic interest has grown to the point
where American scholarship in this field is now internationally recognized. As
for the cultural role of Greek philosophy and its influence as “a way of life,”
that remains an open issue.
Further Reading.
Anderson, Paul R. Platonism in the Midwest.
Temple University Publications, distributed by
Columbia University Press, 1963.
Anton, John P. American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy. Amherst, N.Y.:
Humanity Books, 2005.
Eadie, John W.,
ed. Classical Traditions in Early America.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan,
1976.
Koch, Adrienne. Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers:
Essays in the Interpretation of the
American Enlightenment. Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University
Press,1961.
Reinhold, Meyer. Classical Americana. The Greek and Roman Heritage in
the United States.
Detroit, Mich.:
Wayne State University
Press. 1984.
Schneider, Herbert
W. History of American
Philosophy. Columbia
University Press,1946.
Sleeper, Ralph W. The Necessity of Pragmatism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986.
JOHN P. ANTON