Bloomsbury Academic

Bloomsbury Academic

English

Tired of histories of American philosophy that celebrate the usual suspects—Peirce, James, Dewey and the boys—and leave it at that? In America the Philosophical, I argued that America boasts far more important thinkers than ever get the Good Housekeeping seal from establishment philosophy departments. Now, in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt spectacularly blow up the petrified picture of the field, throwing open the subject to an array of critical thinkers who mattered tremendously in America’s struggle to be a more decent and enlightened society. A history of American philosophy that explains and interprets—in addition to traditional stalwarts—such iconoclastic figures as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aldo Leopold, James Baldwin, and Bell Hooks? Were they a part of American philosophy? You bet they were. At least of any American philosophy worth a dime in the real world.