Racism in the USA not only takes place in law, economics, politics, mass media and new media, education, literature, and popular culture but also occurs in philosophy. An abundance of Latino philosophers, African-American philosophers, and Native American philosophers are excluded from the American philosophy canon. To discover whether racism happens in the field of American philosophy, the writer surveys 15 American philosophy books written between the 1940s and the 2020s by various American writers, the whites and the non-whites. The writer (...) carries out an ‗index-study‘: scanning philosopher names in the index of each book, identifying and scrutinizing the names, listing and categorizing them into race categories, counting them, comparing the number of non-white philosophers and white philosophers mentioned in each book, putting them in a table, and interpreting why there is a disparity between the number of non-white and white philosophers included in the books. The survey result shows that racism happens in American philosophy; the writers of the 15 American philosophy books exclude an abundance of non-white philosophers. There is a critical need to write a new, post-national American philosophy book that does justice to non-white philosophers in the near future so that racism diminishes. (shrink)

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University's John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second-generation Columbia naturalists and their students who later joined the department reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel's attempt to build an alliance with (...) the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar's primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either???analytic??? or???Continental??? eclipsed the Columbia philosophers??? normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of???American philosophy??? that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches. (shrink)

Unlike our counterparts in Europe who have rewritten their specific cultural philosophical heritage, American feminists have not yet critically reappropriated our own philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. The neglect is especially puzzling, given that both feminism and pragmatism explicitly acknowledge the material or cultural specificity of supposedly abstract theorizing. In this article I suggest some reasons for the neglect, call for the rediscovery of women pragmatists, reflect on a feminine side of pragmatism, and point out some common features. The (...) aim is to encourage the further development of a feminist revisioning of pragmatism and a pragmatist version of feminism. (shrink)

According to G. E. Moore, moral expertise requires abilities of several kinds: the ability to factor judgments of right and wrong into (a) judgments of good and bad and (b) judgments of cause and effect, (2) the ability to use intuition to make the requisite judgments of good and bad, and (3) the ability to use empirical investigation to make the requisite judgments of cause and effect. Moore’s conception of moral expertise is thus extremely demanding, but he supplements it with (...) some very simple practical guidance. (shrink)

The recent publication of Dewey's seminar lectures on Hegel's philosophy of spirit, which he delivered in Chicago in 1897, contributes significantly to the ongoing task of more accurately appreciating the confluence of historical influences that shaped the trajectory of classical American philosophy. Dewey's 1897 Hegel lectures are situated within their philosophical context by two seminal essays describing the relevance of recent scholarship to the philosophical or historical question of Dewey's ambivalent indebtedness to Hegel. In their essays, Shook and Good emphasize (...) the positive roles that certain Hegelian themes played in Dewey's mature thought—that is, in texts produced many years after Dewey's alleged .. (shrink)

The characteristic form of human action is an extemporaneous performance or improvisational exertion. An ordinary conversation (what C. S. Peirce calls “a wonderfully perfect kind of sign-functioning” [EP 2: 391]) provides us with an extremely useful model for understanding other forms of “unrehearsed intellectual adventure” (Oakeshott 1991: 490), not least of all jazz improvisation. But since our inquiry into this range of considerations turns on appealing to our experience as improvisational actors in the overlapping situations of everyday life, this appeal (...) itself needs to be considered. Accordingly, the appeal to experience is here interrogated with the aid of what pragmatists but also perfectionists such as Stanley Cavell say about it. What Cavell asserts regarding checking one’s experience, as a way of rendering it trustworthy, is of the utmost critical importance for the present inquiry. After exploring what is entailed by an appeal to experience, when conjoined to what Cavell identifies as the task of checking one’s experience, the author turns to our quotidian experience as improvisational actors and, ultimately, to the rather singular achievements of jazz improvisers. In doing so, he hopes to illuminate the inherently creative dimension of human action, wherever it unfolds. (shrink)