Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 192
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-4422-2333-2 • Hardback • August 2013 • $102.00 • (£78.00)
978-1-4422-6003-0 • Paperback • September 2015 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-4422-2334-9 • eBook • August 2013 • $42.50 • (£35.00)
Steven M. Cahn is professor of philosophy at The Graduate Center at CUNY and president of the John Dewey Foundation.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
About the Contributors
1. A Life in Philosophy
Nicholas Wolterstorff
2. Sixty Years of Philosophy in a Life
J. B. Schneewind
3. How It Was
Judith Jarvis Thomson
4. A Philosopher’s Calling
Ruth Barcan Marcus
5. The Romance of Philosophy
Richard J. Bernstein
6. Reflections of My Career in Philosophy
Harry Frankfurt
7. God and Evil Among the Philosophers
Marilyn McCord Adams
8. Unnatural Lotteries and Diversity in Philosophy
Claudia Card
Index
This text is a collection of select lectures from the American Philosophical Association's John Dewey Lectures. They are chosen for their autobiographical nature and all focus on the orator's career and calling as a philosopher. There is a fairly even split of male and female philosophers from the last half century, the most notable of whom is Harry Frankfurt, known for his work On Bullshit. The philosophers in question are all former or current academics, and many of their reflections focus on going to school and transitioning from student to teacher roles, while conducting research and attending to post-graduate demands. Claudia Card's contribution is interesting for the way it exposes academic philosophers' gender-biases and the social situation of 'doing philosophy' in a university setting. Philosophy appears in every lecture, but more as a dramatic or literary prop than an object of thought.
— Book News, Inc.
These Dewey lectures, written by some of the leaders of the field, provide an informative and thought-provoking perspective on the ways philosophy and academia more generally have changed over the last fifty years. Practicing philosophers, and anyone with a historical or sociological curiosity about the discipline of philosophy, will find much of interest here.
— Susan Wolf, University of North Carolina