American Philosophy

Exploring the history of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of the West's colonized indigenous tribal peoples, Williams here traces the development of the themes that justified and impelled Spanish, English, and American conquests of the New World.

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

THE GODS OF BUSINESS is, as the MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW writes, "A 'must-have' primer for anyone unfamiliar with basic tenets of world religions in today's era of ...

In this engaging book, Douglas Anderson begins with the assumption that philosophy—the Greek love of wisdom—is alive and well in American culture. At the same time, professional philosophy remains relatively invisible. Anderson traverses American life to find places in the wider culture where professional philosophy in the distinctively American tradition can strike up a conversation. How might American philosophers talk to us about our religious experience, or political engagement, or literature—or even, popular music? Anderson’s second aim is to find places (...) where philosophy happens in nonprofessional guises—cultural places such as country music, rock’n roll, and Beat literature. He not only enlarges the tradition of American philosophers such as John Dewey and William James by examining lesser-known figures such as Henry Bugbee and Thomas Davidson, but finds the theme and ideas of American philosophy in some unexpected places, such as the music of Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, and Bruce Springsteen, and the writingsof Jack Kerouac.The idea of “philosophy Americana” trades on the emergent genre of “music Americana,” rooted in traditional themes and styles yet engaging our present experiences. The music is “popular” but not thoroughly driven by economic considerations, and Anderson seeks out an analogous role for philosophical practice, where philosophy and popular culture are co-adventurers in the life of ideas. Philosophy Americana takes seriously Emerson’s quest for the extraordinary in the ordinary and James’s belief that popular philosophy can still be philosophy. (shrink)

Ever since, while continuing to develop his liguistic theories, he has been the most prominent US critic both of his country's foreign policy and of the intellectuals and media that give it overwhelming consensual support. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" was followed by a series of ever more devastating attacks on American policy in Vietnam (collected in American Power and the New Mandarins and At War With Asia ): by 1970, he was far and away the best known intellectual opponent of (...) the US war effort. (shrink)

This study of 19th- and 20th-century American Literature analyzes narrative and psychological affiliation to answer the question: What are the ramifications of a view of landscape and what part does the act of storytelling play in shaping these approaches? ;While standard literary-critical emphases on the pastoral and myth symbolism add to our understanding, the focus has almost always remained on epistemological skepticism or trope formation. Thus attention has been directed inward, as though the human psyche alone constructs its idea of (...) the world. This work argues that we should focus on more than the strictly theoretical debate about how the mind constructs knowledge. ;From a base in phenomenological philosophy and geography, this study traces our idea of how identity is formed in place. The dissertation turns to Henry Thoreau and his Journal and late essays as a foundational literature of American inhabitation. Thoreau's late works help to develop a vocabulary with which we can read other works of the American literature of inhabitation, such as captivity narratives and nature writing, where we discover the American sense of home as more than the built environment. For these writers, the physical groundedness of the world creates senses of history, community, and affiliation. The study also points to some of the problems of an archaeological sense of the life-world and history residing in place, and questions the realization concerning earlier, Native American inhabitants. ;The final section addresses the storying of place and how imaginative works of fiction from a crucial period in American history create a world. Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Vardis Fisher, and John Steinbeck have focused on psychological and physical inhabitation, and raised important questions about how narrative and communally-held stories shape and address identity in relation to the land. (shrink)

Much of the attention of recent students of American philosophy has been concentrated on the study of philosophers and ways of doing philosophy in the post-Civil War era. It is understandable that this should be so, for the problems of late nineteenth and twentieth century thought are still alive, still perplexing, in our own attempts at philosophic understanding. There is much, however, that is overlooked by narrowing our focus to what Max Fisch and his associates describe as "classic" American philosophy, (...) and to our own post-classic era. It may well be that some aspects of the earlier and now unfashionable philosophies and philosophers can still have resonance in our thinking if only we are willing to give these older philosophies a hearing. For this reason, this present study explores the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and reexamines his thought at the point where, it seems to me, it is still viable today, namely as a social philosophy for a society, like our own, hopelessly committed to an extreme individualism. (shrink)

Positioning Du Bois's arguments in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) within social theory enhances our understanding of the phenomenological dimensions of racial oppression and of how oppressed groups build on members' differences, as well as on what they share, to construct a cosmopolitan and richly textured community. Du Bois wrote Souls just at the beginning of the Great Migration but indicated that geographical dispersion would deepen racial solidarity, enhance the meaningfulness of community, and emancipate individual group members through participation (...) in mainstream society while maintaining their black identity. Du Bois's writings have powerful implications for understanding how to promote racial justice, and contemporary readers might consider that they have implications for social justice more generally. An analysis of black newspapers that were published during the period of 1900 to 1935 illustrates how Du Bois's conceptions were woven into discourse and everyday practices. (shrink)

In this book the author examines various aspects of a selection of Western Great Lakes American Indian philosophical traditions and beliefs. He combines over forty years of stories, anecdotes, and observations learned from Western Great Lakes tribal elders into a coherent and thought-provoking philosophy text which challenges readers to look beyond their own cultural prepossessions and discover a method of asking questions where the answers come from within.