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...