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bittersweet_symphony 's review for:
American Philosophy: A Love Story
by John Kaag
This is the first of what I consider to be John Kaag's popular philosophy trilogy, which includes Hiking with Nietzsche and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. It's very much a precursor to Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, which goes more in-depth on William James' life and philosophy. This book is a general survey anchored by the Boston Brahmins, and includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, William Ernest Hocking, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and Fanny Parnell—and of course, William James.
Part memoir, part history of philosophy, Kaag's book is an accessible exploration of American philosophy, through the lens of Kaag's own physical tramping through the mostly lost book collection at West Wind, the former home of Ernest Hocking, an influential American philosopher the general public hears very little about.
I appreciate the perspectival approach Kaag takes to philosophy, reminding us, in pragmatist fashion, that any given philosophy is always from the perspective of an "I."
Kaag is involved in a valuable effort to blur the lines between the public and the now over-technicalized world of academic philosophy. Much has been lost as philosophy has moved to ivory towers, yet there are advocates of public philosophy that still draw breath!
This short-ish book makes for a good gift to those intimated by philosophy, going through a divorce (as Kaag was while writing it), or wanting to become acquainted with some of the great, albeit mostly male, thinkers of the 19th and early 20th-century world centered around New England.
Part memoir, part history of philosophy, Kaag's book is an accessible exploration of American philosophy, through the lens of Kaag's own physical tramping through the mostly lost book collection at West Wind, the former home of Ernest Hocking, an influential American philosopher the general public hears very little about.
I appreciate the perspectival approach Kaag takes to philosophy, reminding us, in pragmatist fashion, that any given philosophy is always from the perspective of an "I."
Kaag is involved in a valuable effort to blur the lines between the public and the now over-technicalized world of academic philosophy. Much has been lost as philosophy has moved to ivory towers, yet there are advocates of public philosophy that still draw breath!
This short-ish book makes for a good gift to those intimated by philosophy, going through a divorce (as Kaag was while writing it), or wanting to become acquainted with some of the great, albeit mostly male, thinkers of the 19th and early 20th-century world centered around New England.