This collection of thirteen essays, when viewed together, offers a unique perspective on the history of American philosophy. It illuminates for the first time in book form, how thirteen major American philosophical thinkers viewed a problem of special interest in the American philosophical tradition: the relationship between experience and reflection. Written by well-known authorities on the figure about which he or she writes, the essays are arranged chronologically to highlight the changes and developments in thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism to Process Philosophy.


While Doctrine and Experience will be of particular interest to specialists in American Philosophy, there is also much to offer anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States.


In order of appearance, the essays are:


"Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening" by John E. Smith

"Heart and Head: The Mind of Thomas Jefferson" by Andrew J. Reck

"Emerson and the American Future" by Robert C. Pollock

"Chauncey Wright and the Pragmatists" by Edward Madden

"Charles S. Peirce: Action Through Thought - The Ethics of Experience" by Vincent G. Potter

"Life Is in the Transitions': Radical Empiricism and Contemporary Concerns" by John J. McDermott

"John Dewey and the Metaphysics of American Democracy" by Ralph W. Sleeper

"Individualization and Unification in Sartre and Dewey" by Thelma Z. Levine

"Josiah Royce: Anticipator of European Existentialism and Phenomenology" by Jacqueline Ann K. Kegley

"The Transcendence of Materialism and Idealism in American Thought" by John Lachs

"C. I. Lewis and the Pragmatic Tradition in American Philosophy" by Sandra Rosenthal

"The Social Philosophy of George Herbert Mead" by David Miller

"Existence as Transaction: A Whiteheadian Study of Causality" by Elizabeth Kraus.