A certain eclecticism is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of American philosophy. The deep structure which generates the whole range of views and positions in American philosophy is quite easy to locate. It is this: there are fifty states in the Union. These can be listed in one column. In a second column, one can list all available philosophic schools: positivists, pragmatists, Platonists, Thomists, Hegelians, Wittgensteinians, existentialists and so forth.

There is now a very simple and absolutely reliable law, which runs as follows: To every possible pair of elements, drawn one each from the two columns, there corresponds at least one living, real, concrete professor of philosophy. In other words, there is at least one Texas Hegelian, one Nebraska phenomenologist, one West Virginia Wittgensteinian, one Ohio Kantian and so forth. Of course there may be more than one, but in all circumstances there is at least one.