Pragmatism_and_Analytic_Philosophy

Pragmatism is a family of viewpoints within philosophy especially about epistemology, theory of knowledge, truth theory, and the nature of the sciences. It is exemplified in the works of and was largely originated by C.S. Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce, all of whom were American philosophers. So it is distinctly American. It involves several distinctive themes and has interesting relations to later schools of thought like logical positivism and the entire Euro-anglish analytic tradition. It's basically what Americans were doing while the transformation from British Idealism to analytic was going on overseas You can see that the analytic tradition includes among its originators thinkers that are German, English, and Polish. If it can truly be said to have originated anywhere it would have to be Austria/Germany. Peripherally to that core of three nations or languages you also have Dutch, French, and other early thinkers, but it is easiest to think of analytic as being largely originated within those three nations or languages. The reason that we call the continental tradition "continental" today is because, despite this central European origination of analytic, Europe ultimately largely abandoned both the analytic style and its concerns. The reasons for this abandonment are too complicated to go into but certainly World War II and the resultant brain drain of scientists and mathematicians from Europe had quite a lot to do with it. The philosophical tradition which analytic replaced was, for the most part, German and British Idealism. However it's not true so much to say that it replaced it as that these traditions gradually transformed into analytic through the influence of Frege, Russell, etc. In some sense you might say that analytic was a return to an earlier British empiricism or at least to the general temperament of the empiricists. This would, however, gloss over a great deal. In addition, continental philosophers place importance on theory as well as practice, often viewing their philosophy in terms of individual, moral, or political transformation