American Philosophy After the Golden Age: Columbia University in the City of New York, 1904-1967

Andrew Jewett

My project, American Philosophy After the Golden Age: Columbia University in the City of New York, 1904-1967, examines the history of Columbia’s philosophy department as a case study of the challenges and opportunities that scientific methodologies presented to three generations of American scholars. Today’s historians identify the years between 1870 and 1940 as a critical turning point in the public role of American colleges and universities, one marked above all by what Julie A. Reuben calls “the marginalization of morality.” While the university reformers believed they could modernize knowledge without divorcing it from normative commitments, Reuben argues, the intrinsic logic of scientific inquiry forced them into a radical separation of facts from values which left the universities unable to speak to morally charged social questions. In my current research program, I reassess this “scientific turn” in American intellectual life. Historians of higher education draw on a rigid model of value-free science that was constructed by prominent philosophers and social scientists between the 1930s and the 1950s. However, historians of the philosophy of science indicate that accounts of science which refused to enforce the fact/value distinction flourished into the 1950s. Meanwhile, practitioners of “science studies” have demonstrated that science is a cultural practice, defined by a set of social boundaries rather than a specific subject matter, philosophical axiom, or methodological algorithm. If we abandon Reuben’s assumption that scientific methods lead inexorably to moral indifference, how does our account of the rise of the modern university change? My first book, To Make America Scientific: Science and Democracy in American Public Culture, 1870-1950, is an overview of scientific reformers’ attempts to find an appropriate role for colleges and universities in a newly industrialized society. I argue that many of these figures denied the possibility of completely objective knowledge, and were attracted to the scientific model precisely because they believed that it was socially relevant. American Philosophy After the Golden Age will focus more sharply on the resistance mounted by philosophers against the logical positivists’ restrictive model of science. Some historians of philosophy argue that professionalizing philosophers bracketed the moral concerns of the pragmatists in the 1920s, but Columbia’s philosophers defended a socially engaged model of scientific philosophy, under the rubric of “naturalism,” well into the Cold War era. They retained a broad sense of their discipline’s social role and sought to turn New York into a crucible of democratic culture for a technological age. Building on the preoccupations of their twin “fathers,” John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, Columbia’s philosophers—including John Herman Randall Jr., Irwin Edman, Horace S. Friess, Herbert W. Schneider, Charles Frankel, James Gutmann, and even the consummate professionalizer Ernest Nagel—focused on aesthetics and the history of ideas as subjects that could bridge the gap between intellectuals and the public. They also played a key role in developing Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization, General Honors, and Colloquium on Important Books programs, which helped crystallize a new model of liberal education in the United States. Through their writings and speeches, as well as their engagements with the Ethical Culture movement, adult educators, and other philosophers, the Columbia naturalists helped define the universalistic, biologically informed liberalism associated with better-remembered Columbia figures such as Richard Hofstadter, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling. A detailed examination of their careers will help us formulate a new narrative of the impact of science on American higher education.

About Andrew Jewett

After a false start as a physics major, I received my B.A. in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. My senior thesis examined the writings of Cora Lenore Williams, a Berkeley progressive educator from the early twentieth century. I then spent four years as a musician and editor before returning to Berkeley for graduate study under David A. Hollinger, an intellectual historian who focuses on the role of academic thinkers and institutions in the United States. I received my Ph.D. in 2002 with a dissertation entitled “To Make America Scientific: Science and Democracy in American Public Culture, 1900-1950,” which I am currently updating for publication. During the 2002-2003 academic year I was a member of the inaugural group of Visiting Scholars at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I will be teaching full-time at Yale University during the fall of 2003 and half-time in the spring of 2004, when I will also begin my official tenure as a Spencer Fellow.