2016 AM: Cornel West's Neglected Contribution to the Pragmatist Canon

Cornel West argues that pragmatism is the ideal philosophical view to address the ways in which ideas like race, gender and class are produced and redescribed in history. Pragmatism is ideal because it highlights history, context and problem solving. As a quintessentially American tradition, pragmatism’s canonical figures had not sufficiently wrestled with these quandaries in a way that would make sense to anyone who understood slavery, discrimination and segregation as problems worth solving. West’s "The American Evasion of Philosophy" (1989) focused on that insufficiency. For reasons that we explore in a panel devoted to his innovative text, West’s engagement with and expansion of the canon is worthy of the collective intellectual attention of those concerned with the persistence of problems that are best addressed when one evades quests for epistemic certainty. Panelists: Kevin Wolfe Clifton Granby Julius Crump Xavier Pickett Victor Anderson, Presiding This discussion was recorded at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, Texas, on November 23.

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