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American Philosophy: The Basics introduces the history of American thought from early Calvinists to the New England Transcendentalists and from contract theory to contemporary African American philosophy. The key question it asks is: what it is that makes American Philosophy unique? This lively and compelling book moves through key periods in the development of American thought from the founding fathers to the transcendentalists and pragmatists to contemporary social commentators. Readers are introduced to:Some of the most important thinkers in American history including Jonathan Edwards, Thom

Beginning with the assumption that philosophy - the Greek love of wisdom - is alive and well in American culture, this work traverses American life to find places in the wider culture where professional philosophy in the distinctively American tradition can strike up a conversation

Beginning with the assumption that philosophy - the Greek love of wisdom - is alive and well in American culture, this work traverses American life to find places in the wider culture where professional philosophy in the distinctively American tradition can strike up a conversation

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction: Inheritance, Teaching, and the Insane Angels of American Culture: Our Cultural Invisibility -- One. Some Preliminary Remarks on the Origins of Pragmatism -- Two. Royce, Philosophy, and Wandering: A Job Description -- Three. Wilderness as Philosophical Home -- Four. Working Certainty and Deweyan Wisdom -- Five. Wildness as Political Act -- Six. ''After All, He's Just a Man'' -- Seven. William James and the Wild Beasts of the Philosophical Desert -- Eight. John Dewey's Sensible Mysticism -- Nine. ''Born to Run'' -- Ten. Philosophy as Teaching -- Eleven. Learning and Teaching -- Twelve. Emerson's Platonizing of American Thought -- Thirteen. American Loss in Cavell's Emerson -- Fourteen. Emerson and Kerouac: Grievous Angels of Hope and Loss -- Fifteen. Pragmatic Intellectuals -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

chapter Introduction -- chapter Naturalism or Idealism -- chapter The Great Art Which is Philosophy -- chapter Philosophy and its History -- chapter Nature and Reason -- chapter A Philosophic Mind in the Making -- chapter The Philosophic \ -- chapter The Faith of a Logician -- chapter A Search for System -- chapter The Philosophy of a Meliorist -- chapter Philosophical Liberalism -- chapter \ -- chapter The Impersonal Point of View and the Personal -- chapter Some Second Principles -- chapter The Way of Opinion -- chapter My Development and Present Creed.

Contributors -- Alphabetical list of entries -- Introduction -- Entries A to Z -- Index

The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy offers the most ambitious survey to date of American philosophical thought. Provides a comprehensive history of philosophical thought in America. Brings together 24 newly commissioned essays written by leading scholars in American philosophy. Covers all of the major eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical movements in America including idealism, pragmatism and naturalism. Examines the major figures and themes in American philosophical thought. Includes useful bibliographies

"Rebecca Farinas takes seven major figures from the American philosophical canon and examines their relationship with an artistic or scientific interlocutor. In so doing, she provides a unique insight into the origins of American philosophy and, through case studies such as the friendship between Alain Locke and the biologist E.E. Just and the collaboration between Jane Addams and George Herbert Mead, sheds new light on these thinkers' ideas"--