19th Century American Philosophy

This paper examines the interplay between hope and despair in David Walker's "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World" (1829). I argue that, in his pamphlet, Walker mobilizes despair about the depth and seeming insurmountability of white supremacy to catalyze collective political agency and thereby emancipatory hope among Black Americans. This emancipatory potential of despair is grounded a distinction between the content of despair (a belief in the insurmountability of white supremacy) and its form as a political judgment made (...) in concert with others. Walker uses the form of despair as political judgment to effect a transformation in the political affect of Black Americans from a shared sense that there is nothing to be done to to a collective sense of a 'we' that can act to change the world. (shrink)

Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, such (...) as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery. (shrink)

The book Utopia in Dark Romanticism deals with a glorious period of American literature in the first half of the 19th century, but its purpose is not to narrate the history of American literature in the Romantic era, but to reconstruct the geography that was formed with the concept of Utopia in this era.

Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao (廖文奎, 14. November 1905 – 1952) is a founding theorist of post-war Taiwan independence. We should see his pre-eminence as multifaceted, not merely because of his political engagement but because of his prolific intellectual achievement. He was a politician and activist who began the post-war overseas Taiwanese independence movement and shed light on its theoretical foundation. He was also an intellectual historian and political psychologist who applied and combined the philosophies of the Chicago pragmatist school, continental Lebensphilosophie, (...) and Eastern Neo-Confucianism, along with Sun Yat-sen’s political doctrines, to contemporary East Asian intellectual discussions. He was one of the few Taiwanese who had proximity to Chinese Nationalist elites but chose to become an early advocate of Taiwanese independence Joshua’s complex character thus made him a figure of the post-war Taiwanese political history and a topic of East-Asian intellectual history that combined different traits of political and social thinking. (shrink)

This review essay situates recent scholarship on two 19th century Black American political activists, Maria Stewart and Henry McNeal Turner, in relation to contemporary Black political thought on the role of despair in the Black freedom struggle. As Jared Loggins has argued in this journal, (“Who Decides What We Should Do with Our Despair?,” Winter 2022), despair’s role is a question of political judgment: it is a decision to be made rather than an answer to be discovered. I argue that, (...) by returning to the role of despair in 19th century Black American political thought, we are able to enrich our political imagination concerning possibilities for despair and its counterpart, hope, in emancipatory politics. Maria Stewart offers us a vision of apocalyptic hope for the end of an unjust world, while Henry McNeal Turner despairingly declares that the Black freedom struggle must begin again. (shrink)

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David (...) Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

Anne Conway and Maria W. Stewart are quietly revolutionary philosophers who provide valuable insights into the nature of suffering and its relation to justice. Conway scholars have claimed that she offers a theodicy, trying to reconcile suffering with the existence of a just God. However, this does not make sense of her arguments or audience. Instead, we should see her as a theoretician of the role of suffering in a person's life. Moving beyond the personal, Stewart's emphasis on social sources (...) of suffering leads her to posit a vision for bringing about a more just society in the near term that is absent in Conway. Both philosophers provide fascinating insight into how to theorize suffering and justice, including the role of unity in a just society. (shrink)

I reconstruct the civic republican foundations of Eugene Debs’s socialist critique of capitalism, demonstrating how he uses a neo-roman conception of freedom to condemn waged labour. Debs is also shown to build upon this neo-roman liberty in his socialist republican objections to the plutocratic capture of the law and threats of violence faced by the labour movement. This Debsian socialist republicanism can be seen to rest on an ambitious understanding of the demands of citizen sovereignty and civic solidarity. While Debs (...) shares some of the commitments of earlier American labour republican critics of capitalism, he departs from them in his thoroughgoing commitment to common democratic ownership of productive property. His socialist republicanism remains valuable today for its ability to illuminate features of plutocratic control, judicial autocracy, and the regime of property best suited to suppressing economic domination. I conclude that Debs not only deserves a prominent place in an emerging radical republican canon but presents a distinctive contrast with many of his Marxist contemporaries and offers a compelling challenge to recent liberal, plebeian, and socialist forms of republicanism. (shrink)

Not long after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, an American citizen was captured by U.S. soldiers on he battlefield carrying a weapon and wearing the dress of a Taliban soldier. Heralded by the news media as the “American Taliban,” he became a spectacle, bound, gagged, naked and blind-folded on a stretcher in a photo taken soon after his capture. The story of how the homeschooled twenty-year-old from a middle-class Northern California family became an enemy combatant in the Afghani desert piqued (...) the popular imagination. After converting to Islam, he went to Yemen, learned Arabic, returned home and then left again to attend a madrassa (or Islamic religious school) before receiving training at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Some Americans reacted to the young man’s story with wonder; others with loathing. How did this youth stray from the values that most Americans hold dear? In fact, he did not. Similar to Paul Maud’dib who, at the end of Dune Messiah, wandered into the desert a blind holy man, the American Taliban had acted in accordance with values that most American prize: self-reliance, ingenuity, spirituality and practical know-how. It is widely believed that the Fremen culture derives from their religion, Zensunni , an imaginative blending of Zen Buddhism and Sunni Muslim beliefs. However, a closer look reveals that the Fremen (similar to the American Taliban) were shockingly American in their core values. To demonstrate this, I begin by discussing the weirdness of Dune’s Fremen, their religion, customs and lifestyle. Then, I give a brief summary of American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay “Self-Reliance” followed by a similar treatment of John Dewey’s notion of democracy as a way of life. The essay returns to paint a clearer picture of the American Fremen and their exhilarating though dangerous faith in jihad as a way of life. (shrink)

John Cage and Henry David Thoreau draw attention to the indeterminacy of wild nature and imply humans cannot entirely control the natural world. This paper argues Cage and Thoreau each encourages his audience to recognize their own human limitations in relation to wildness, and thus each helps his audience to develop greater humility before nature. By reflecting on how Thoreau’s theory relates to Cage’s music, we can recognize how Cage’s music contributes to audiences’ environmental moral education. We can appreciate the (...) role of music in helping audiences to develop values conducive to environmentally sustainable practices. (shrink)

Discursive cognition of the sort that accompanies the grasp of a natural language involves an ability to self-govern by framing and following rules concerning what reason prescribes. In this essay I argue that the formal features of a planning semantics for the deontic and intentional modalities suggest a picture on which shared intentional mental states are a more primitive kind of cognition than that which accompanies the ability to frame and follow a rule, so that deontic cognition—and the autonomous rationality (...) attending the ability to speak a natural language—might be understood as an evolutionary development out of the capacity to share intentions. In the course of defending this picture, I argue that it is supported by work in social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and primatology concerning the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of norm psychology and shared intentionality in human beings. (shrink)

At the close of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty lays out a contrast between what he calls 'systematic' and 'edifying' philosophical anthropologies. Whereas the systematic philosopher aims to speak for the ages, the edifying philosopher addresses herself to issues of her day, often by way of shattering conventional idols. Rorty sees these two approaches as mutually exclusive. The aim of this paper is to defend a conception of philosophy as both systematic and edifying in the relevant senses. (...) I first respond to Rorty's argument that Wilfrid Sellars' account of picturing, as an isomorphic relation between the world and states of the central nervous system, involves an illicit 'mind as mirror' metaphor. I then lay out some of the philosophical anthropology that motivates Sellars' account of picturing, and I connect this anthropology to philosophical and scientific work undertaken in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On this basis I argue that we are left with a (systematic) project handed down to us by earlier generations, and that in taking up this project we are in the (edifying) business of creating new ways of thinking about ourselves as part of the natural world. (shrink)

En affirmant que l’esprit est organiquement relié à l’agir, le pragmatisme a nourri de nouvelles approches de l’enquête, de la signification et du mental. L’épistémologie et la sémantique pragmatistes sont aujourd’hui mieux connues. En revanche, les controverses au sujet de l’esprit, notamment entre James et Peirce, restent à explorer. Elles fournissent une introduction privilégiée à leurs pensées respectives, au moment même où elles trouvent leur première expression originale. On corrigera par là quelques idées tenaces : l’idée d’un James « passant (...) » de la psychologie à la philosophie, l’idée d’une opposition frontale entre Peirce et James, l’idée d’un « tournant pratique » qui s’opérerait brutalement dans les premières années du mouvement. C’est donc un regard nouveau que jette sur le pragmatisme la présente étude, à partir des vifs dialogues entre Peirce et James, des différends avec des positions voisines, celles du jeune Dewey, de Royce, de Bergson, comme des critiques de Helmholtz et Spencer. -/- . (shrink)

台灣問題不再是中國與台灣的問題，而是全世界的問題。 ──廖文奎《福爾摩沙發言》 -/- 廖文奎，1905年生於西螺士紳門第，志學之年負笈京都同志社中學，之後於南京就讀金陵大學，又赴芝加哥大學拜實用主義執首米德門下，攻取碩、博士學位，專研政治心理學與比較哲學史；遊歷歐陸一年，歸國任教於金陵 大學、中央政治學校、中華民國陸軍軍官學校等，國內外著作等身外亦積極辦刊參議政事。然而，二戰期間中日勢如水火，加上戰後國府加劇腐敗失能，廖文奎從呼籲忠於中華民國憲政的台人自治，到台灣民族主義的理論奠基者 ，倥傯顛沛中逝於1952年英屬香港。 -/- 本書摘選收錄廖文奎的十五篇著作。在1945年戰前著作中，可見廖文奎從實用主義探討人的良識、人與社會的關係，並雜揉實用主義、人生哲學暨新儒家、甚至行為主義心理學等研途，為智識公民理想與中國政治改革提出建 言。1945年戰後，廖文奎多著政論，論建台人自治的藍圖，1947年二二八事變前後，更嘗試提出憲政體制建構下的台灣民族主義理論，直至二二八事變後流亡海外，廖文奎仍持續投書，發表著述。從中國民族主義者到反 抗中國的台灣民族主義者，廖文奎民族認同的辯證，正印證了20世紀前半期中、台之間「迂迴、曲折」的歷史糾葛。.

ABSTRACT Although in recent years Christine Ladd-Franklin has received recognition for her contributions to logic and psychology, her role in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, as well as her relationship with American pragmatism, has yet to be fully appreciated. My goal here is to attempt to better understand Ladd-Franklin’s place in the pragmatist tradition by drawing attention to her work on the nature and unity of the proposition. The question concerning the unity of the proposition – namely, the problem (...) of how to determine what differentiates a mere collection of terms from a unified and meaningful proposition – received substantial attention in Ladd-Franklin’s time, and would continue to interest analytic philosophers well into the twentieth century. I argue that Ladd-Franklin had a distinct theory of the proposition and solution to the problem of the unity of the proposition that she developed over the course of her writings on logic and philosophy. In spelling out her views, I will also show her work interacted with and influenced that of the pragmatist who was her greatest influence, C.S. Peirce. (shrink)

.As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also used her editorial position to philosophize. Her column entitled “Letters from New York” is particularly philosophical, including considerations of infinity, free will, time, nature, art, and history. She especially turned to German philosophers and intellectuals such as Kant, Schiller, Bettina von Arnim, Karoline von Günderrode, Jean Paul, Herder, and Hegel (...) in an attempt to guide her readers to a rejection of slavery for the right philosophical reasons. I consider the influence of German philosophy on three particular themes in her writings: a Romantic-Spinozistic view of humans and nature; a Kantian conception of conscience; and a Hegelian description of the philosophy of history. (shrink)

While the image of the slave as the antithesis of the freeman is central to republican freedom, it is striking to note that slaves themselves have not contributed to how this condition is understood. The result is a one-sided conception of both freedom and slavery, which leaves republicanism unable to provide an equal and robust protection for historically outcast people. I draw on the work of Frederick Douglass – long overlooked as a significant contributor to republican theory – to show (...) one way why this is so. Focusing the American Revolution, the subsequent republican government established new political institutions to maintain the collective interests of the whole population. The political revolution was held in place by processes of public reason that reflected the values and ideas of the people that had rebelled. The black population, however, had not been part of this revolution. After emancipation, black Americans were required to accept terms of citizenship that had already been defined, leaving them socially dominated, subject to the prejudices and biases within the prevailing ideas of public discourse. Douglass argued that republican freedom under law is always dependent on a more fundamental revolution, that he calls a ‘radical revolution in thought’, in which the entire system of social norms and practices are reworked together by members of all constituent social groups – women and men, black and white, rich and poor – so that it reflects a genuinely collaborative achievement. Only then can we begin the republican project of contestatory freedom as independence or non-domination that today’s republicans take for granted. (shrink)

James developed an evolutionary objection to epiphenomenalism that is still discussed today. Epiphenomenalists have offered responses that do not grasp its full depth. I thus offer a new reading and assessment of James’s objection. Our life-essential, phenomenal pleasures and pains have three features that suggest that they were shaped by selection, according to James: they are natively patterned, those patterns are systematically linked with antecedent brain states, and the patterns are “universal” among humans. If epiphenomenalism were true, phenomenal patterns could (...) not have been selected (because epiphenomenalism precludes phenomenal consciousness affecting reproductive success). So epiphenomenalism is likely false. (shrink)

At more than five-hundred pages, this volume — the first in a set of five — is neither a short nor an easy read. Most will, I suspect, treat the book as a reference work, consulting only those sections relevant to their study. But its materials are sometimes demanding; and in several chapters readers will encounter considerable interpretive difficulties. I shall have more to say about these difficulties further down. First, though, a few comments on the book’s contents.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:262 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (p. 86). Since a category is a type of concept, it appears from this account that Kant holds a linguistic theory of concepts in general. According to Bird, Kant identifies concepts with language (pp. 61, 121, 123-124); they are, for him, linguistic entities (pp. 100, 104). On one occasion he refers to Kant's theory as a "picture of language" (p. 102). Kant seems thus to (...) be transformed by Bird into an ordinary language nominalist--and that a century and a half before Wittgenstein. The trouble with all this is that it simply is not supported by the text. Rather than giving a linguistic interpretation of concepts in general and categories in particular, Kant constantly analyzes them in conceptual terms. He speaks of them as forms of thought, ideas, conditions or criteria of thought, acts of pure thought, and so on. Their origin is always the human understanding. But, as Bird states in the passage quoted, Kant believes that our language sets a limit to our understanding. This might be taken to mean that language controls our thought so that we can conceive only what we can verbally describe. Or it could have a stronger meaning--that thought is reducible to verbalization. Bird seems to accept the latter as the proper interpretation of Kant for he contends that Kant holds the view that to conceive something is to describe it linguistically (pp. 127-129). If these words are to be understood in their ordinary meanings, one seems forced to the conclusion that in Bird's mind Kant is a linguistic behaviorist. If this is what Bird means to imply, it hardly seems worthwhile to pursue his linguistic reformulation of the critical philosophy any further. Nevertheless, the question remains in the reader's mind, "Why should any student, particularly one who has shown such understanding and appreciation of Kant, depart from his scholarly approach to the Critique to attribute to Kant a theory which, instead of having any plausibility as an interpretation of the Kantian epistemology, seems rather to be a parody of the argument it is meant to explain?" OLIVERA. JOHNSON University of California,Riverside Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism. By Edward H. Madden. (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963. Pp. vii + 203. $5.00.) The importance of Chauncey Wright in the history of American philosophy is being increasingly realized. Professor Madden's work is the first comprehensive account of his life, his writings, and his ideas. The sources are scanty and often obscure, but Madden has made exhaustive use of them and gives us a bibliography and critical notes. This is a product of first-class scholarship, bringing together what the author had published in scattered BOOK REVIEWS 263 articles, and supplementing his anthology of Wright (Liberal Arts Press). The biographical chapter presents Wright as an attractive character among devoted friends and also as a solitary, original scientist. Wright's primary achievement was to apply utilitarian principles to Darwinian natural selection theory. Since Darwin himself made no such attempt, nor did John Stuart Mill, and since Darwin showed an evident interest in Wright's attempt, this represents a major contribution to evolutionary theory. On the negative side, too, Wright was incisive in his criticisms of Spencer, Mivart, Hamilton, Mansel, and Lewes. The pragmatic strains in Wright's philosophical method were incidental to his primary interest in showing that sciences are metaphysically "neutral." But his influence on Peirce and James was direct and strong, both on their cosmological and methodological doctrines. He deserves to be mentioned as the prime mover in this trinity of early pragmatism and naturalism, but since his own writings were relatively few and scattered, his historical importance rests largely on the use which Peirce and James made of his ideas and the development which they gave to his philosophy. HER~VRTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Propos sur Jules Lequier: Philosophe de la libert~--R~flexions sur sa vie et sur sa pens~e. Par s Callot. (Paris: l~ditions Marcel Rivi~re et Cie, 1962. Pp. 142 [1]. Biblioth6que Philosophique.) L'oeuvre de Jules Lequier est importante. Nos philosophes am~ricains Charles Hartshorne et William L. Reese en ont fait... (shrink)