Thomas Burke

American philosophy is a broad enterprise reaching well beyond the borders of the United States, encompassing a wide range of topics and agendas. But, in my opinion, the distinctive, defining, core contribution of American philosophy to philosophy at large is the classical American pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead. This school of thought has influenced philosophical discourse all over the world even as we are still trying to figure out what pragmatism is in the first place.

How did you become an American philosopher?

In the late 1980s I was struggling as a graduate student at Stanford to find a dissertation topic. At one point Jon Barwise sent a note to the in-house “situation theory and situation semantics” email list mentioning that during one of his recent talks someone had asked a question concerning possible links to Dewey’s discussions of situations some 50 years earlier. Barwise knew nothing about it and was therefore suggesting it as a possible research topic for anyone who might be interested. I was not particularly interested, but I was struggling. So I took the bait. When I asked him about it, he handed me a copy of Russell’s 1939 review of Dewey’s 1938 Logic. This led me to look at the book itself, and I was hooked. I knew next to nothing about Peirce or James, not to mention Dewey, but I was already primed (via some familiarity with James Gibson’s “ecological psychology”) to jettison modern epistemology in favor of something, anything, that was oriented to a more dynamic interactive conception of ourselves as living things who happen to be able to think...

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