This symposium provides five case studies of the ways that John Dewey's philosophy and practice were influenced by women or "weirdoes" (our choices include F. M. Alexander, Albert Barnes, Helen Bradford Thompson, Elsie Ripley Clapp, and Jane Addams) and presents some conclusions about the value of dialoging across difference for philosophers and other scholars.

There is an odd duality in Cornel West's work. He is a generous thinker and voracious interlocutor, willing to learn from anyone on a sincere quest for insight. But he is also he is an unapologetic admirer of greatness, as stingy with ascriptions of genius as he is lavish with praise for the select few who qualify. "Making Niagara a Cataract" reflects on this duality. I try to explain what motivates West's commitment to the importance of greatness, and how these (...) motivations emerge from and shape his intellectual project. (shrink)

This article will highlight the distinctive role of Cavell in renewing a dawn of American philosophy. Following Emerson’s remark, ‘the inmost in due time becomes the outmost’, Cavell develops his distinctive line of antifoundationalist thought. To show how unique and valuable Cavell’s endeavor to resuscitate Emerson’s and Thoreau’s voice in American philosophy is, this paper discusses the political implications of Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism. This involves a reconsideration of what measures justice and what justifies happiness. While Cavell is sometimes said (...) to be too personal and too subjective to be political, I shall argue that his Emersonian perfectionism, with its concomitant idea of the conversation of justice, is in fact thoroughly political and democratic. I shall illustrate this by examining his writing on a Hollywood film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). The film shows vividly that happiness is a condition for achieving democracy from within. In conclusion, I shall propose that a readiness for the risk inherent in speech, rather than, say, acquiescing in received ideas or hiding behind the words of others, is at the heart of perfectionist education for globally minded citizens. (shrink)

“The world is,” William James notes, “full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds”. As a radical empiricist, he takes there to be more to experience than any of our stories or other forms of account can ever capture. Here as everywhere else, “ever not quite” and “ever not yet” qualify even our master strokes. As a (...) radical pluralist, accordingly, he takes these partial stories to be the best we can ever do. The plurality of narratives can never all be gathered into our hands and woven into a fully coherent metanarrative or even an all-inclusive story. Loose... (shrink)