On the Viennese Background of Harvard Neopragmatism

Abstract

The Americanization of originally European analytic philosophy, beginning with the rise of Nazism in Europe before WWII, has aptly been described as a move “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square” (Holton 1993). There are, indeed, significant links between the Viennese-based (and more generally European) logical empiricism and the American tradition of pragmatism; these links, furthermore, can also be argued to have been influential, albeit often implicitly, in the emergence of what is today known as “neopragmatism”. In the United States, C.I. Lewis, Ernest Nagel, and W.V. Quine, among others, were important mediators between these philosophical schools; accordingly, the Columbia and Harvard philosophy departments were instrumental in the development of this very special dialogue between two key orientations of twentieth century philosophy. Another mediating figure – some decades earlier – between pragmatism and early analytic philosophy was Frank Ramsey, who could have changed the history of twentieth century philosophy by developing a synthesis of these philosophies, had he lived longer. Charles Morris’s “pragmatic empiricism” was yet another milestone between Vienna and America; Morris argued for the complementarity and even convergence of pragmatism and logical empiricism throughout the 1930s, and he returned to the topic in his contribution to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Rudolf Carnap in the 1960s (see Morris 1937, 1938, 1963; cf. Carnap 1963).