Thursday, October 27, 2005
(8:56 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Best American Philosopher Now? Ever?
UPDATE: Peirce is out in front by a good bit for best ever. Cavell gets honorable mention as best living, but since he's in his mid eighties he's not exactly what we're looking for as far as up-and-comers on the American scene go. I'd like that suggestion that we look at actual philosophy departments, but I don't care how many votes they get, analytic folks whose work has very little or no application to other fields in the humanities (especially politics) don't count. I'm looking for a philosopher, not a simple logician (Aristotle and Plato, for instance, at least wrote some obscure works on politics, ethics, rhetoric, and the like).Perhaps I just feel as if I'm probably missing something. Who would you say is the best American philosopher currently writing? From the late seventies to the early or mid nineties that mantle might have been contested to a greater or lesser degree by a number of folks. Names come to mind such as Cornell West, Richard Rorty, Frederick Jameson, Stanley Fish, John Caputo, or, if you count someone who has been here a really long time even though not born here, Alasdair MacIntyre. Of course, all of these old timers are still living and breathing and even writing things now and then, but are any of them anything like the best right now? I guess I'm wondering what the names are, if any, in a new generation of U.S. philosophers. We at the weblog are fond of discussing contemporary philosophers (or anti-philosophers if you will) from France, Italy, Slovenia (any contemporary Germans?, don't know much about them either), but I really don't know of many U.S. figures under 65 that I feel like I am supposed to think that maybe I ought to consider reading.
Judith Butler, I suppose, and since Jodie has her assigned for a class, I'll be perusing Bodies That Matter soon. Also at Cal, Boyarin. But I don't really think of Boyarin as an original Philosopher. He's damned interesting to read and hear, but in a lecture at Duke he talked about reading until he found a theory that he liked and then figuring out what set of Jewish and Christian texts from the first four centuries he could use that theory to illuminate. We could propose someone like Michael Hardt, but I'm definitely convinced that he is not the source of the original ideas. Is Butler doing anything that she didn't learn almost directly from Foucault and Derrida? Really, I must be missing someone.
Maybe America is not capable of producing good, original philosophers. Maybe its like the whole Rome/Greece thing: pilfer and 'perfect'? Of course, it has produced some original philosophy in the past. Even if you exclude folks like Leo Strauss and Arendt who were born and trained elsewhere, you have folks from way back such as Emerson, Jefferson, and Jonathon Edwards who have to be considered philosophers of sort in their own various ways. It almost goes without saying that to crown the best philosopher of all time in the U.S., we have to look to the pragmatists.
While James, Peirce, or Dewey may be the obvious choices, I much prefer W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois' combination of pragmatism (from his teacher James) with Goethe/Romanticism and one of the very first sociological investigations earns my vote. The theory of double consciousness that structures The Souls of Black Folks is simply stunning. Miles ahead of time with respect to question of power and identity.
Who do you nominate? Now? Ever? Maybe later we'll have a vote, though I don't know how to do one of those fancy tabulation boxes.
