America the Philosophical

by Romano, Carlin

• ISBN13: 9780679434702
• ISBN10: 0679434704
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-22
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

A bold, insightful book that rejects the myth of "America the Unphilosophical," arguing that America today towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace for truth and debate that far surpasses ancient Greece or any other place one can name. With verve and keen intelligence, Carlin Romano--Pulitzer Prize finalist, award-winning book critic, and professor of philosophy--takes on the widely held belief that ours is an anti-intellectual society. Instead, while providing a richly reported overview of American thought, Romano argues that ordinary Americans see through phony philosophical justifications faster than anyone else, and that the best of our thinkers ditch artificial academic debates for fresh intellectual enterprises, such as cyberphilosophy. Along the way, Romano provocatively seeks to topple philosophy's most fiercely admired hero, Socrates, asserting that it is Isocrates, the nearly forgotten Greek philosopher who rejected certainty, whom Americans should honor as their intellectual ancestor. America the Philosophicalis a rebellious tour de force that both celebrates our country's unparalleled intellectual energy and promises to bury some of our most hidebound cultural clich s.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
American Philosophy and the Tradition
Therapists, Bootstrappers, Infantry	p. 27
Parsing America	p. 47
Great White Men and the Ivy League Cavalcade	p. 66
Rorty's Revolution	p. 126
Abandoning Toothless Truth: Other White Males Muscle In
Persuasion and the Brows	p. 161
Psychologists and Psychiatrist	p. 185
The Literary Critics	p. 208
The Political Theorists	p. 231
Linguist, Mathematician, Neurologist	p. 250
The Casual Wisemen	p. 260
The Print Journalists	p. 281
The Broadcasters	p. 296
The Rising Outsiders
African Americans	p. 313
Women	p. 344
Native Americans	p. 443
Gays	p. 451
Gutenberg's Revenge: The Explosion of Cyberphilosophy
The Book Lives!	p. 467
Cyberpolitics	p. 478
Cyberreligion	p. 484
Cyberliteratuxe	p. 496
Cybercynics	p. 512
Isocrates: A Man, Not a Typo
Busting Isocrates	p. 535
Isocrates's Life	p. 538
Images and Clichés of Isocrates	p. 541
Sophists and Sophistry	p. 543
Rhetoricians and Rhetoric	p. 546
Isocrates, Philosopher	p. 549
Isocrates, Greece and America	p. 555
Just Saying No to Justification: The Magnificent Failure of John Rawls
Not Since John Stuart Mill	p. 563
A Lucky Life	p. 567
Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Argue About	p. 575
Rawls on Justification	p. 583
"The Theory Is Not Successful"	p. 591
Epilogue Obama, Philosopher in Chief	p. 596
Acknowledgments	p. 607
Bibliography	p. 611
Interviews	p. 641
Index	p. 645
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