American Philosophy

Looking at the lives of America's founders-including Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin-scholar and bestselling author Jacob Needleman explores their core of inner beliefs; their religious and spiritual sensibilities; and their individual conception of the purpose of life. The founders, Needleman argues, conceived of an "inner democracy": a continual pursuit of wisdom and self-improvement that would undergird the outer democracy in which we live today. Any understanding of America as a nation of spiritual values will in the years ahead require Needleman's work (...) as a point of reference. (shrink)

Reviews/interviews Capital Ellowen Deeowen: A Review of The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature by Sebastian Groes - Adam Sumera Deconstruction and Liberation: A Review of Simon Glendinning’s Derrida - Wit Pietrzak Authenticity, Transdifference, Survivance: Native American Identity Masked: A Review of Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, ed. Deborah L. Madsen - Monika Kocot Literature, the Arab Diaspora, Gender and Politics - Fadia Faqir Speaks with Maria Assif Absent Fathers, Outsider Perspectives and Yiddish Typewriters - (...) Norman Ravvin Talks to Krzysztof Majer. (shrink)

Derrick Darby’s Rights, Race, and Recognition and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice are two recent efforts to answer the challenges that race and racism pose to liberal theory. Darby draws upon civil rights and abolitionist discourse to advance an “externalist” account of political rights, while Sundstrom explores the strains placed upon liberalism by recent demographic trends. In this review essay, I provide a brief account of their overall arguments, and offer some further (...) critical considerations. (shrink)

In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who rethink the human in material terms. Do our experiences correlate to our material elements? Do visions of a common physical ground imply a common purpose? Noble proposes new readings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, George Santayana and Wallace Stevens that explore a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism. At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience (...) and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, this book turns to poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves. (shrink)