Recently I gave a talk about certain aspects of the history of American Philosophy and the contemporary work of Andrew Cohen and his philosophy of Evolutionary Enlightenment. I intend to publish that talk in a series of which this audio is the first instalment.
In this first part of the talk I speak about what I see as some of the fundamental elements of the American character and where those elements might have come from. I go on to describe some of the major figures in two different generations of American philosophers. The first generation includes Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists and the second generation includes William James and the pragmatists. Around both of these philosophical movements there were a number of significant individuals and groups at work and in a few minutes I try to outline both.