The Evolution of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

despite my increasingly decrepit appearance, I can lay no claim to being one of the founders of SAAP. When I joined the Society in the mid-1970s, it was already a well-functioning organization—if a much smaller one than today. After a few years of attending meetings, I began to submit papers, and I first appeared on the program at our sixth annual meeting at John Carroll University in 1979. (See Fig. 1, the complete program, below.) While I was not one of the founders of SAAP, I did know them all. Presiding at the early meetings were, in the order of their presidencies, such elders as John Lachs, John J. McDermott, Darnell Rucker, James Gouinlock, Beth J. Singer, Peter H. Hare, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Thelma Z. Lavine, Joseph Betz, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Andrew J. Reck. Serving in the background at the same time were such patron saints as Justus Buchler, Douglas Greenlee, Abraham Edel, Max Harold Fisch, Elizabeth Flower, Edward H. Madden, David L. Miller, Frank M. Oppenheim, Evelyn Shirk, John E. Smith, and H. S. Thayer. It was a good time to be coming to American Philosophy, under the guidance of a Society that respected the fundamentals of pluralism and "fallibilism."1The brief discussion of the evolution of SAAP that I offer here initially emphasizes what the Society has meant to me over nearly five decades.2 As I was entering graduate school in 1974, I was drawn by the American philosophical tradition. It was, as William James writes, my "dumb conviction" that the best answers were to be found in this philosophical direction and not in the others, and that my job was to pursue these answers.3 What I found in this tradition was a refuge from both the analytic style of philosophy then dominant in America, with what I saw as its obsession with truth4 and its confusion of cleverness with wisdom, and the alternatives of the various continental traditions that, although they pursued wisdom, seemed to me to rely too strongly on the mysterious or the untranslatable. My own sense of the American philosophical tradition at the time was an amalgam of Puritanism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism in its various forms, and a large dose of Columbia Naturalism. Through further study and especially through my interactions at SAAP meetings, I became more grounded in these approaches and more open to other strands within the tradition.5 For me, cooperative interaction with others was essential to further understanding. Just as for Josiah Royce, the secret was "the community."6Among the lessons that I drew from the American philosophical tradition were the following. I knew that it was necessary to resist the human tendency to believe that what works for me will work for everyone else. As George Santayana reminds us, all philosophy is "personal."7 Thus, certain thinkers and certain thoughts will benefit from their initial plausibility to us, and other thoughts and thinkers will be initially suspect. To counter this personal prejudice, we need to partake in careful, long-term study. On a related point, Ralph Waldo Emerson urges us to seek insight from others, to accept what he calls "provocation" while not accepting their answers.8 At the same time, we live among these other individuals, marry them, teach their children, and benefit from their contributions to our social existence. In other words, American Philosophy teaches us that people are social creatures—a point which both Emerson and James were wary of, but not blind to—and that our thinking should focus on the world of shared experience. As Benjamin Franklin writes, our efforts in "Philosophy" make sense only when our pursuit of wisdom is related to human well-being.9 This point is so important that we need to wonder how our efforts were ever allowed to narrow and separate from a broad sense of human welfare to focus upon supposedly more important minutiae. With John Dewey, I saw the job of philosophers to be helping individuals to understand and deal with their philosophical "problems" of living.10 And, perhaps more than some of you, I was interested in exploring the experiences behind the various philosophical distillations to see how these experiences might be further clarified by literary, historical, and sociological study. In all of this, I was extremely fortunate to be guided by my extraordinary mentors Justus Buchler and John McDermott.Returning from my early sense of the American philosophical tradition to the early meetings of SAAP, we can consider the program from our aforementioned sixth meeting at John Carroll in 1979. The conference ran from Friday morning until Saturday noon. It consisted of six sessions of two papers each (with commentaries) on the following topics: Pragmatism and Phenomenology, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and Truth, William James and Ethics, John Dewey, and Logic and the Philosophy of Science. In addition, there was an informational session on the critical editions of Dewey, Peirce, Santayana, and James that were then in preparation, an invited paper entitled "Personalistic Idealism" by Peter Anthony Bertocci, and an address by John Lachs. This modest meeting offered, as did other meetings in those years, a representative sample of the high points of the early years of SAAP; in comparison to any contemporary program of the American Philosophical Association, it offered a magnificent breadth of range. I never thought that these early attempts by SAAP indicated the outer limits of the Society's purview or fashioned boundaries on our future. Rather, I saw each attempt as a partial sketch of some of the possible strands that could help us to understand better the tradition that we hoped to be advancing. Collectively, these sketches offered us a set of imaginative guideposts. With James Hayden Tufts, I believed that the "symbols" that we have valued in the past could, if suitably reconstructed, aid us in the future.11This capsule contains, as I have said, my non-Founders' history of SAAP, set in my personal reconstruction of the American philosophical tradition. I realize, of course, that this perhaps quaint picture is not what SAAP, or the tradition itself, has always meant to those who saw other possibilities in the tradition or who wanted more from SAAP. Over the years, the Society has evolved slowly into something different from, and better than, what it was at its founding. (The philosophy profession has similarly evolved over the past half-century, if less thoroughly.) Our understanding of America has evolved as well, focusing much of the self-study within the Society on attempts to emphasize issues like equality, diversity, and inclusion that, if always latent in our general democratic ethos, were seldom made manifest. We need to continue to do more, and, if this year's program is any indication, we will.As we have experienced over the last three days of this year's conference, our fiftieth, we have encountered familiar topics like democracy and justice and truth intermixed with, among others, novel considerations of Christian nationalism and collaborative games and sex work. Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Leroy Locke have reappeared, as they have frequently in recent years, along with Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Henry David Thoreau. Grace Abbott and Howard Washington Thurman have joined the discussion, for perhaps the first time. We have explored perspectives from Latin America, India, and Europe, all of which we have considered occasionally before, combined this time with deeper than usual inquiries into bilingualism and colonialism, and indigenous and endangered perspectives. Other topics included disabilities and racism and environmental justice, feminism and care and motherhood, ways of knowing and modes of learning, and urbanism and food. Perhaps unnecessary to mention at this point are the problems of pluralism that our conference both examined and exhibited. Our little Society with its fifteen or so presentations on a narrow range of topics has evolved to the point that we are both delighted and perhaps somewhat puzzled.We find ourselves at present in a situation that should provoke some explicit cognitive dissonance12 in all of us. On the one hand, we all know that the American philosophical tradition—especially in its Pragmatic strain—has always claimed a particular relation to evolution.13 It has been a tradition permeated with process and adaptation, with change and "transition."14 It is a tradition that celebrates the lasting reality of impermanence. On the other hand, the American philosophical tradition is just that—a tradition—and we live our intellectual lives largely within it, polishing and fine-tuning what we have inherited. The resolution for this dissonance is to remind ourselves that our goal in respecting the tradition is not just knowing it, but "reconstituting" it so that we can pass it on to others in a better form.15 As conscious evolutionists, we attempt to direct the future of this tradition through study and interpretation.The old SAAP was far more metaphysical, or perhaps religious, than the current SAAP. Similarly, the old SAAP showed only a fleeting acquaintance with economic questions or international issues, and seldom engaged with hot-button topics like class or race or gender.16 The old SAAP was largely satisfied with a high-brow and economically comfortable understanding of the social role of the philosopher, and a narrow sense of America that overemphasized its distant New England roots. The old SAAP did display a vitally important sense of piety toward our origins and toward those who have gone before, but it also showed a lesser interest in exploring our flaws. For example, we tended to sacralize our values like democracy and justice divorced from their pragmatic failures, a flaw that would be similar to considering Walden without the dirt—that is, as a series of Chautauqua lectures rather than as an experiment in living.While the story of American Philosophy that SAAP originally offered is unacceptable to us at present, we may regret—but we cannot deny—that it was, to a large extent, an accurate presentation of the American philosophical tradition that was inherited by our founders and then passed on to us.17 Our story was often thoughtlessly oblivious to the absence of women or minorities or the disabled. Only on occasion did our inquiries offer anything significant to those who were immigrants, or LGBTQ, or veterans, or those who worked on farms or in the mills. If we failed to incorporate these and other lived situations in our philosophical efforts, however, the Society was simply reflecting the lacunae within the tradition. Philosophy in America was a conservative academic discipline within a conservative academic institution that seldom considered the experiences of those who did not fit that mold comfortably. Philosophy in America seldom considered those who were different—or, as I survey this audience, those who look more like us.18 Over the subsequent years, SAAP has shown that our history is not our destiny. The Society has changed, and the contours of our tradition have been revised as well. Individually, we have learned to be more pluralistic and tried to be more fallible; collectively the process of change continues. To stay intellectually alive, we must continue to grow; while intellectual growth is painful, societies like SAAP can help us as we help them. It is difficult for us to glance back at the narrowness of our interests in prior years, as it is painful for us to recognize the "blindness"19 of our heroes in the American philosophical tradition to serious social issues that now seem so obvious to us. Difficulty and pain aside, however, we are actually harmed, individually and collectively, only if we refuse to adapt and grow.When I consider the evolution of SAAP, I see it in the context of the processive development of similar groups. Intellectual advance depends upon a number of factors. Among them are the prodigality of thinking and the resultant availability of intellectual variations present in the ideas of the member population, and an evaluation of how these variants address the problems that we are encountering. Advance also requires the pluralism and fallibilism that allow for the respectful consideration of these various developing heresies and of contributions that we import from outside the tradition. In the course of the decades—and time is important here—the shifting balance among the multiple perspectives gives a series of temporary advantages to different themes that in our case have slowly and cumulatively nudged the Society in a variety of new directions. These new directions have caused some of our members to despair about—and all of us on occasion to wonder about—where the Society is headed.Our admittedly flawed American philosophical tradition should not be allowed to operate as a straitjacket on the development of SAAP in the future. At the same time, this tradition is not irrelevant either. As we move forward, striving to recognize the inadequacies of the past and to feel the needs of the present, we must do so without jettisoning the potential contributions of the tradition that we are attempting to advance. Our inherited values, however clouded they may seem at present, must be retained. Ideas remain tools, and we discard them at our peril. If we, as individuals or as a Society, fail to maintain a working knowledge of the complex subtleties within such achievements as the will to believe or the fixation of belief, someone else will have to preserve them under a different name. No one will allow that Transcendentalism, for example, is vestigial; however, without the efforts of SAAP, or some society like it, to preserve their useful contributions, the Common Sense Realists, the St. Louis Hegelians, and the Personalists might well be forgotten. Others, of course, can take care of themselves. Thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Jane Addams, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clarence Irving Lewis will continue to be discussed on our programs, spurring others to study their ideas. Still, we will have to work to keep alive the contributions of Cadwallader Colden and Jonathan Edwards, of Hartley Burr Alexander, Mary Whiton Calkins, and William Ernest Hocking, of John Herman Randall, Jr., and Justus Buchler—and other representatives of significant moments in the history of American Philosophy. For my part, I am more partial than I suspect many of you are to the significant contributions of Benjamin Franklin and James Hayden Tufts—and my book sales back me up here. No doubt, you all have your own underappreciated thinkers as well. Working together, we can carry forward the contributions of the past, provided we also rethink what the story of our past should be, and address the problems of the present and the future.A healthy amount of what Santayana calls "retentiveness"20 is required to maintain the balance of stability and change. Our goal is not to be pack-mules, loaded down indiscriminately with nuggets of philosophical value. Still, some attempts at advancement can be hasty. Dewey writes that intellectual progress comes about when we "get over" our old problems.21 Similarly, Susanne Langer tells us that, if philosophy is to progress, we must recognize what needs to be "abandoned."22 In both of these cases, however, it seems to me that this willingness to move on is premature, unless we first manage to figure out what specifically we need to preserve and to reject. And sadly, as we all know, the easiest way to get over the past is simply not to know it. This is why it matters that we learn more about where we came from—the good and the bad—so that we can continue to discover who we are. Our Society can help to create a "usable past" for individual members, and our members can help to do this for the Society.23 Any living society must be an evolving society; however, without a deep connection with its roots, a society disintegrates rather than evolves.Prediction is a risky business, and our ability to decipher trends is limited. It is tough to recognize the directions of any evolutionary process, especially from within. Who among us, for example, anticipated the positive impact of that analytic apostate Richard Rorty on American Philosophy? Or, how many of you—like me—saw more promise for American Philosophy in the works of Thomas Merton or Reinhold Niebuhr or Wendell Berry than others have seen so far? Because prediction is a risky business, I wish to say little about the future of SAAP beyond indicating a set of contributions that I believe we should strive to maintain if we are to continue to advance the values that we have found in the American tradition. These would include, as I mentioned previously, a commitment to philosophy as a personal endeavor that is built upon long-term study, an emphasis upon a social understanding of the self that respects others and their contributions, a focus upon the lived problems of these individuals, and an openness to the contributions of the broad range of the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences.We do not want a Society that merely preserves American Philosophy as it once was, however important that heroic work was half a century ago. We also want a Society that also continues to fill in the blind spots that we have recognized since then, and that will continue to reveal other blind spots that we have yet to recognize. I look forward to the new voices and topics that are to come, and to the disruptions to our comfortable ways of thinking that they will bring. In other words, I anticipate moving toward the margins of our evolving Society, becoming a participant-observer for whom each conference brings moments of both upset and delight. I say without resignation that change comes for us all. If it sometimes appears that our elder members are dinosaurs who have somehow avoided the fatal meteor, the corollary is that our younger members are at best pre-dinosaurs, who should not think that the last meteor has fallen. We all need to continue our efforts to appreciate more fully the values of our past and to uncover more aggressively the wondrous possibilities of the present. It is safe to predict that the evolution of SAAP will continue, and I have faith that the generations of SAAP members will continue to pull more or less in the same direction.I admit that, looking back over the years, my set of central issues constitutes a fairly narrow sample of the possible issues within American Philosophy. I suspect that your sets—although different—are fairly narrow as well. We work on what we feel is important.24 We work to solve our problems, and only then can we try to address the problems of others. As a Society, we try to stress pluralism and fallibilism and to remain open to the contributions of our various affiliated societies and beyond, because familiarity with a broad variety of insights leads to a greater understanding of our shared experience. If we can both preserve a level of piety toward the American philosophical tradition without falling into idolatry, and if we can continue to draw in benefits from the diverse approaches of our seemingly centrifugal present, we can feel confident about the future. Santayana once compared intellectual progress to a "procession" that we have joined and will continue to follow as long as we can.25 I believe that our Society in its various manifestations has functioned as such a procession, and, without knowing exactly where we are headed, I am happy that I have been able to take part.