Carlin Romano: America the Philosophical

[Liam]

"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 of truth and argument 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 abandon artificial academic debates for fresh intellectual enterprises, such as cyberphilosophy.

Along the way, Romano 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 Philosophical introduces readers to a nation whose existence most still doubt: a dynamic, deeply stimulating network of people and places drawn together by shared excitement about ideas. From the annual conference of the American Philosophical Association, where scholars tack wiseguy notes addressed to Spinoza on a public bulletin board, to the eruption of philosophy blogs where participants discuss everything from pedagogy to the philosophy of science to the nature of agency and free will, Romano reveals a world where public debate and intellectual engagement never stop.

And readers meet the men and women whose ideas have helped shape American life over the previous few centuries, from well-known historical figures like William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to modern cultural critics who deserve to be seen as thinkers (Kenneth Burke, Edward Said), to the iconoclastic African American, women, Native American, and gay mavericks (Cornel West, Susan Sontag, Anne Waters, Richard Mohr) who have broadened the boundaries of American philosophy.

Smart and provocative, America the Philosophical is a rebellious tour de force that both celebrates our country's unparalleled intellectual energy and promises to bury some of our most hidebound cultural clichés."

[Bubba]

Too many empty adjectives ("smart and provocative," "bold, insightful," "dynamic, deeply stimulating"), Liam. You sound like you're practicing writing jacket copy for a second-tier publisher. I myself haven't read any of Romano's books, but I have read several of his articles and reviews. For the most part, one word was more than enough: boring.

[Hamlet]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/bo...pagewanted=all

...from the NYT Sunday Book Review.

[Eric]

Hamlet, is Gobbsmack's review yet another agonising, self-hating Yank flossopher spreading himself out over umpteen paragraphs, or is there a profound subtext? Whether you agree with opinions or not, sometimes you get so lost in the complexities of verbiage that you're not sure whether you like the book or the review or not.

[Liam]

@ Bubba: Oh, I haven't read the book but kind of want to (not sure if I have time for a 700-pp philosophical tome at present); this review comes from the Amazon page (editorial book description): sorry, I should have used quotation marks, I usually do but it skipped my mind for some reason.

[Hamlet]

Hamlet, is Gobbsmack's review yet another agonising, self-hating Yank flossopher spreading himself out over umpteen paragraphs, or is there a profound subtext? Whether you agree with opinions or not, sometimes you get so lost in the complexities of verbiage that you're not sure whether you like the book or the review or not.

The review is a fairly easy read Eric,

...it's down to earth, the reviewer does what we'd all do faced with such claims, initially scratch the head, probably chuckle, then think - ahh, maybe there's something in all this, but in the end I decided... and this is only groundless opinion but why put everything under the microscope... that this is a book which *may* cause some Amercans to feel good about their sense of national self-worth, at a difficult time for Americans or any of us in the West.

Without suggesting of course that the author is lowering themselves to this level, it does come at a time when many of the other news reports, studies, tomes etc are suggesting something else: that the West has had it and is now in terminal decline.

But, in defence of said tome: it is controversial, and that is the job, or one job, of philosophers: to provoke us and make us think!

I believe however that suggesting that the Greeks (Aristotle, Sophocles et al) have now been overtaken by American thought and pragmatism, "cyberphilosophy" as he calls it, is a very bizarre and skewed claim, and highly questionable, and to labour the point -- potentially a load of old tosh.

We'll have to wait 2500 years I guess to see if it's true and whether his text is cited as being the key work in identifying this turning point. I doubt it.

I don't see it this way myself, I think that America, like most countries, is very diverse and continues to become if anything more diverse and subject to continual change.

The Greeks - credited as they are as being the starting point along with Christianity in the Western traditions or Western thought - are a part of that diversity, not opposed to it or somehow welded into the past and therefore now redundant.

America, like ourselves, have inherited this cultural information, even if it's not conscious or if many would say "ugh, I don't remember studying Aristotle..." the answer is -- but you use problem-solving techniques which may have begun with the Greeks every day and it may only be to prepare your shopping list but it's all there.

The one thing I did notice - and it reminds me of an introductory chapter I once read to "Leaves of Grass" by dear ole Walt Whitman - is that America has always sought to define itself against us, since Whitman's time, as a distinct nation, or it has at least wished to be distinct from Europe and I personally believe that it is.

Many don't.

And perhaps this is part of that drive, unconsciously or othewise as here in this particular book-thesis; but in philosophical terms that might explain my initial confusion where I just thought "...why bother, does all this really matter!"

At first I also thought it was a jingoistic piece of fluff masquerading as philosophy, but perhaps it's an attempt to analyse how the world is unfolding, America being used as the test case here and leader in the great democratic experiment, the new Holy Land, familiar concepts to most in standard American history tomes.

Or maybe this is what happens to you when you spend too much time in academia, a certain "disconnect" to the ordinary lives of most of us; like most Americans, I think that most Brits, or most French, are just trying to survive, raise families and be happy... I tend to distrust these sweeping theories that try to join-up the whole of a society and credit it with some new renaissance.

[Heteronym]

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

Of course, they saw right through Bush's bullshit when he sold them a worthless trillion dollar war their grandchildren will not finish paying off, they can see right through the bullshit of oil companies' junking the stats on global heating, and they can see right through the bullshit of the Creationists and Scientologists, who have enormous power in the USA.

[Eric]

I agree with Hamlet about the fact that Europe has been the cradle of most movements and inventions over the past thousand years. And I certainly agree that most normal, non-psychotic, people are simply trying to bring up families and survive in our dangerous world.

What I question is the value of yet another guru-status book, well hyped by the publisher, about how we should live, what we should do, why everything we are doing is right, or wrong, or in between. Surely, all these families trying to bring up kids haven't got time to read yet another book by a cerebral know-all on how to better their lives.

There's nothing wrong with Emerson and the American Transcendentalists. But some of the more recent names smack of hero-worship and drooling.

I don't think the West is in terminal decline, because it holds the seeds for a sane future, despite mistakes. The Chinese economy will implode quite soon, causing yet more misery for the workaholic Chinese (remember Maoism?). Russia has been on a road to nowhere for 500 years and isn't going to stop now, and Africa isn't exactly paradise either. So despite the recession and the potential break-up of the euro, I still reckon that Western Europe ("western" in the political sense) isn't such a bad place to live compared with most other nightmare continents.

I don't masochistically bash the Yanks all the time, because their military power is our guarantee of at least a semi-civilised existence, as opposed to the barbarism and chaos we read about every day in the newspapers, online or paper.