Perpetual gratitude

Ford’s Frank on Thanksgiving

American Culture Minor

 American Culture Minor 

Philosophy and Religious Studies 

Advisor: Phil Oliver 

The 18-hour interdisciplinary minor in American Culture is intended for students who want to explore a variety of disciplines as a way of thinking about U.S. culture. This minor is ideal for students who have wide-ranging interests. It is also an excellent choice for students who are politically engaged and want to understand contemporary U.S. culture and its problems. It is especially suited for students who wish to highlight the liberal arts element of their education. 

Interdisciplinary Minors 

Interdisciplinary minors require the student to complete a minimum of 15 to 21 hours from a list of specific courses. Unless otherwise noted, a student may take no more than 6 hours of courses from a single department until he or she surpasses the required minimum number of hours necessary for completing the minor. Exceptions to this rule may be found within the discussions of several of the minors. In most cases, a student is also limited to just 3 hours of credit toward the minor in the same department or discipline in which he or she is taking a major. Students must fulfill all departmental prerequisites for any course within an interdisciplinary minor. In some cases, advisors may approve course substitutions within these program requirements. 

Required Courses (6 hours)  

HIST 3040 - Topics in American Cultural History 3 credit hours 

OR  

HIST 4740 - American Cultural and Intellectual History 3 credit hours  

ENGL 3310 - Nineteenth-Century American Literature 3 credit hours 

OR  

ENGL 3320 - Twentieth-Century American Literature 3 credit hours 

OR  

ENGL 3360 - Multicultural Literature of the United States 3 credit hours Electives (12 hours) In addition to the core courses in history and English, students are required to take 12 semester hours of upperdivision courses chosen in consultation with the minor advisor. Please see the advisor for a list of approved courses for the minor.

Fwd: Henry Jackman

I Am An American Philosopher: Henry Jackman

-An Interview Series with John Capps-

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-henry-jackman/

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Kierkegaard on possibility

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Albert "Randy" Spencer

I Am An American Philosopher: Albert "Randy" Spencer

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-albert-r-spencer/

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How to Save the American Experiment

To see a way out of our destructive spiral we should look to the innovation of the 1920s.

As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. Germany's interwar political dysfunction looms largest because of its descent into fascism. Yet there is a more hopeful example, overlooked though much closer at hand: the United States of a century ago.

At the outset of the 1920s, a wave of attempted assassinations and political violence crested alongside new barriers to immigration, a campaign of deportations and a government crackdown on dissenting speech. America was fresh off a pandemic in which divisive public health measures yielded widespread anger and distrust. Staggering levels of economic inequality underlaid a fast-changing industrial landscape and rapidly evolving racial demographics. Influential voices in the press warned that a crisis of misinformation in the media had wrecked the most basic democratic processes.

Even presidential elections eerily converge. In 1920, national frustration over an infirm and aging president helped sweep the Democratic Party out of the White House in favor of a Republican candidate offering the nostalgic promise of returning America to greatness, or at least to normalcy. A faltering President Woodrow Wilson gave way to Warren Harding and one-party control over all three branches of the federal government.

Yet what is striking about the 1920s is that, unlike the German interwar crisis, America's dangerous decade led not to fascism and the end of democracy but to the New Deal and the civil rights era. Across the sequence of emergencies that followed — the Great Depression and eventually World War II — the United States ushered in an era of working-class political empowerment and prosperity. The nation ended Jim Crow in the South and established free speech with court-backed protections for the first time in its history...


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/politics/how-to-save-the-american-experiment.html?smid=em-share

Russell vs American philosophers and the attack on truth | John Kaag » IAI TV

Let's get something very clear straight away: James never claimed that truth was a matter of mere convenience or momentary utility. John Dewey might have made this mistake occasionally, but James did not. James's pragmatism, at its core, is a philosophy of experience—not experience in the fleeting, subjective sense, but experience extended, socialized, and tested across the rough surfaces of reality. It is not unlike C.S. Peirce's conception of truth as an approximation to the facts in the infinite long run, tested scientifically by observation and experience. Once this is understood, Russell's critique begins to falter...

https://iai.tv/articles/russell-vs-american-philosophers-and-the-attack-on-truth-auid-3165

John Kaag: “James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that’s for the best.”

NYTimes: Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

"The findings of psychedelics wouldn't have surprised Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche and, most certainly, William James," John Kaag, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an expert on James, told me. Only over the past 100 years has the discipline, through an "analytic turn," been "trying to reduce all of human experience to the understandable, to the explicable," he said. "And James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that's for the best."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/books/review/justin-smith-ruiu-on-drugs-philosophy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Meliorist reading list

"I was looking for books that offer good, practical ideas on how to make the world a better place"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/saving-the-world-nicholas-kristof/