Cornel West A Critical Reader

by Yancy, George; West, Cornel

• ISBN13: 9780631222927
• ISBN10: 0631222928
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-08-22
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.

Author Biography

George Yancy is McAnulty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University. He is editor of African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (1998), named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1999.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	x
Notes on Contributors	xii
Cornel West: The Vanguard of Existential and Democratic Hope	1	(16)
George Yancy
Part I Pragmatism	17	(86)
Pragmatism Resurgent: A Reading of The American Evasion of Philosophy	19	(19)
Hilary W. Putnam
The Unacknowledged Fourth Tradition: An Essay on Nihilism, Decadence, and the Black Intellectual Tradition in the Existential Pragmatic Thought of Cornel West	38	(21)
Lewis R. Gordon
Cornel West on Prophesy, Pragmatism, and Philosophy: A Critical Evaluation of Prophetic Pragmatism	59	(24)
Clevis Headley
Which Pragmatism? Whose America?	83	(20)
Eduardo Mendieta
Part II Philosophy of Religion	103	(74)
``Let Suffering Speak:'' The Vocation of a Black Intellectual	105	(10)
James H. Cone
Religion and the Mirror of God: Historicism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism	115	(24)
George Yancy
Is Cornel West also Among the Theologians? The Shadow of the Divine in the Religious Thought of Cornel West	139	(15)
Victor Anderson
Cornel West's Improvisational Philosophy of Religion	154	(13)
M. Shawn Copeland
Existential Aptness and Epistemological Correctness: Cornel West and the Identity of the ``Lord''	167	(10)
Josiah Ulysses Younge III
Part III Political Philosophy	177	(116)
Cornel West on Gender and Family: Some Admiring and Critical Comments	179	(13)
Iris M. Young
Prophetic Pragmatism as Political Philosophy	192	(32)
Charles W. Mills
``Radical Historicism,'' Antiphilosophy, and Marxism	224	(21)
John P. Pittman
Cornel West and Afro-Nihilism: A Reconsideration	245	(16)
Floyd W. Hayes III
On Cornel West on W. E. B. Du Bois	261	(19)
Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr
The Political Philosophy and Humanism of Cornel West	280	(13)
Howard McGary, Jr
Part IV Cultural Studies	293	(53)
``It's Dark and Hell Is Hot:'' Cornel West, the Crisis of African-American Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Race	295	(17)
Peniel E. Joseph
Reading Cornel West as a Humanistic Scholar: Rhetoric and Practice	312	(23)
Clarence Shole Johnson
Cornel West's Representations of the Intellectual: But Some of Us Are Brave?	335	(11)
Nada Elia
Afterword	346	(17)
Cornel West
Select Bibliography of Cornel West's Works	363	(6)
Index	369