2023-24 Academic Catalog

The class is a survey of this distinctly North American tradition, which understands knowing the world as inseparable from exercising one’s agency within it. We will especially focus on the tradition’s directedness towards various dimensions of social improvement and the notion that philosophy is a tool in the realization of an inclusive American democracy. We will start with the readings on how an indigenous philosophical perspective served as a crucial source of American pragmatism, we will then read works of African American Pragmatists as well as “classic” pragmatists and emerging theories such as Black Feminist Pragmatism.