Philosophy in American academia went through two phases after the Second World War.

The first was influenced and shaped by the ideas of the Vienna Circle and a small collection of thinkers from Oxford and Cambridge and lasted from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. Although there were notable exceptions, this approach, loosely known as analytic philosophy dominated academic philosophy and largely displaced previously influential systems such as Neo-Hegelianism, transcendentalism and pragmatism. Analytic philosophers focused on areas that had achieved prominence in the first part of the century: symbolic logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and language analysis. There was a marked skepticism about ethics and political theory and an increasing disconnection between academic philosophers and mainstream society.

The second phase, which had no single dominant system, arose partly because of dissatisfaction with the analytic movement, both from analytical philosophers themselves and from those who felt that it did not adequately address a number of important social issues. From within the movement, writers like W.V.O. Quine (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”), Edmund Gettier (“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”) and Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) all challenged fundamental tenets of the analytic approach. Kuhn’s work, moreover, had profound impact outside colleges and universities, introducing the notion of a paradigm into popular culture.

Concurrently the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, debate over Vietnam, environmental activism and advances in medical technology were only a few of the social forces that an increasing number of philosophers felt were being inadequately addressed. The desire to grapple with these, coupled with the publication of John Rawls’ influential A Theory of Justice (1971), led to a resurgence of interest in social political philosophy and ethics. Ethics, in turn, further branched into a series of sub-specialties: medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, engineering ethics and legal ethics—each of which gave rise to its own association, conferences and journals. Far from being disengaged from everyday concerns, many of these applied ethicists became consultants to governments, hospitals and businesses, and developed influential think tanks and centers throughout the country (e.g. the Hastings Center).

In addition to these reactions against the analytic approach, at least three other trends emerged: contemporary continental philosophy feminism and pragmatism. The first came about in the 1960s as the work of existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and Albert Camus reignited interest in non-Anglo European philosophy This continued into the 1970s and 1980s with the growing popularity of deconstructionism, and other variations of postmodernism by authors like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. As the number of women in the field grew, feminism became increasingly influential, although academic philosophy remained heavily dominated by white males.

Feminist texts, articles and conferences on everything from science and logic to business and politics became increasingly common. Finally, pragmatism, due in large part to the work of Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), was revived and ceased being exclusively the province of historians.