European Philosophy and American Philosophy

Corresponding to the political allegiances of the time, the We of the U. S. Constitution reflects the Generality of the Frenchman Rousseau, rather than the Atomism that is typical of British Empiricism.  Now, it is not for nearly a century that a uniquely American Philosophy emerges--Peirce's Pragmatism, which reflects the influence of German Philosophy in two ways--Kant's privileging of Praxis, and Hegel's Dialectics.  The latter does not survive in subsequent Pragmatisms, though another German, Marx, influences Dewey's variety, and Schopenhauer, Santayana's.  But, one constant feature of that doctrine that is a clear split from its European antecedents is what Peirce calls Probabilism, which entails a rejection of the commitment to Certainty that informs all of them.  Pragmatism's innovative recognition of Uncertainty as an irreducible factor in human experience expresses the open-endedness of the American Experiment, and is more aptly characterized as a 'Philosophy of the Future' than what Nietzsche presents under that rubric.