From Boston to St. Louis: German Idealism in America

This essay traces the American lives of German idealism by way of a series of emblematic places, particularly New York, St. Louis, Missouri, and towns in New England. Particular attention is paid, first, to Asa Mahan’s synthesis of European philosophical sources, such as Kant; secondly, to the various ways in which German Idealist thought was communicated and circulated through translations of Victor Cousin; thirdly, to the initial diffusion of Hegelianism in America which culminated in the founding of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy by William Torrey Harris in 1867; and, finally, to the role of Hugo Münsterberg in theorizing an Idealist legacy for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. By recounting these episodes, the essay shows how the reception of German Idealism, profoundly transformed and reinvented by its American readers, shaped the landscape of American philosophy before the pragmatism nourished by native philosophies emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as the dominant American philosophy.