Bethany Henning

What does American philosophy mean to you?

Recently, I have been thinking of philosophy as the way that a culture reflects upon itself.

I didn’t have a context for understanding what was meant by the word “philosophy” when I was growing up and every time I teach a freshman classroom, I see that this is the case for many of us. I majored in philosophy by something like an accident—I had planned to become a lobbyist for publicly funded education and a staff advisor recommended a philosophy degree as the best preparation. In college, I was exposed to European thinkers, came to understand that there was a split between “Continental” and “Analytic” philosophy, and I knew that the latter was associated with the “Anglo-American style,” but was not thought of as a tradition in the precise sense. When I learned that there was a history of interconnected thinkers associated with the Americas, it started to dawn on me how little I knew about my own context, and by extension, myself.

American Philosophy is a way of asking who we are and what we have done. It is a way of thinking together about who we might become. It is a conversation that we undertake in the light of the possibilities that we can imagine, based on the circumstances in which we are situated. So it is a conversation about what kind of wisdom might be most germane to those people who are associated with “American” life—and it is best to leave that signifier open for continuous reinterpretation.

I find it encouraging that American philosophy is so often committed to pluralism as a central tenet, and although it is a difficult vow to uphold in practice, our striving to do philosophy, to think and talk together in the pursuit of genuine pluralism, is the creative tension that generates the highest possibilities for thought. For this reason I am very proud to be an American philosopher... (continues)

Bethany Henning is Besl Chair for Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University. She is the author of Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious (Lexington Books, 2022) and works in American Philosophy, Feminism/Queer Theory, Aesthetics, and Ecology.