PHIL 35 [winter 2020] -- Philosophy in the Americas

Our course will provide a survey of some of the highlights in the history of philosophy that emerges in the Americas, with a special focus on the history of philosophy in North America and especially in the United States.

We will begin by reading selections expressing the philosophical understanding of the world, humanity, and the divine, that was already formulated by the peoples living on the continents prior to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas after Columbus at the end of the 1400s. We will then explore some of the philosophical visions of these same topics that emerged in North America during the initial ‘colonial’ period in ‘New Spain’ and ‘New England’, looking at attempts to European and ‘Indian’ religious-intellectual traditions. From here we will follow out intellectual developments in the early U.S., focusing in particular on questions of social and political identity in relation to the various kinds of inhabitants of the continent, including ‘native Americans’ as well as those forcibly removed from Africa and transported to the continent as slaves. Our focus after the Civil War and Emancipation will continue to be on the ongoing philosophical articulation of what it means to ‘American’, in light of the wide range of diversity (‘pluralism’) of the inhabitants, along race and ethnicity, gender, class, and political philosophies. We will follow out this question through the period of the World Wars, on into the Civil Rights movements of the mid-century. We will conclude with some more recent assessments of the problems and prospects of the philosophy of ‘being American’.

One goal of the course will be to introduce and critically engage with a wide variety of questions about how best to incorporate geology (natural ‘history’) and history as the activity of humans into philosophy itself, both into ethics, politics, and the philosophy of culture, but also into philosophical anthropology, i.e., discussions of the nature of being human itself, in particular what philosophical import should be found in the ongoing ‘facts’ arising from the Americas. Another will be to explore the wide variety of philosophical traditions and approaches that have actively taken up these questions over the centuries of human habitation of these continents. A third will be to begin to formulate (by the conclusion of the course) an assessment of the problems and prospects for future work in the ‘philosophy in the Americas’, the philosophy of being ‘American’, and our understanding of ‘American philosophy’.

{tentative}
wk1: indigenous philosophies (Mayan, Aztec, Iroquois, Delaware)
wk2: philosophies of colonialism (Bartolome de las Casas, Cadwallader Colden, Benjamin Franklin)
wk3: Christian philosophies in the 'new world' (Sor Juana de la Cruz, Jonathan Edwards)
wk4: transcendentalism, unitarianism, feminism (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller)
wk5: philosophies of liberation on the eve of the Civil War (Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass)
wk6: anarchism and pragmatism (Emma Goldman, William James)
wk7: socialism and social philosophy (W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
wk8: philosophy of the city, philosophy of race (Jane Addams, José Vasconcelos)
wk9: philosophy of the state and structural oppression (Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin)
wk10: pluralism and 'American progress' (Maria Lugones, Cornel West)


PHIL 35 -- Philosophy in the Americas Winter 2020

Instructor: Clinton Tolley office: H&SS 801X hours: tbd email: ctolley [at] ucsd.edu	Teaching Assistant: J.C. Gonzalez office: H&SS 801X hours: tbd email: jcg050 [at] ucsd.edu	see canvas page for readings etc

Lecture

Required textbooks

Course requirements

Schedule of topics

Satisfaction of university distribution requirements

Reference links

Course URL