I Am An American Philosopher: Lisa Heldke – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

I Am An American Philosopher: Lisa Heldke

"I like to think that I'm always doing American philosophy, because I am trying to cultivate an understanding of philosophy that finds it manifested in all sorts of activities, and because I try to approach life as Deweyan inquiry."

Lisa Heldke is Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College where she also directs the annual Nobel Conference. She is the author of Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (2003) co-author of Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (2016) with Ray Boisvert, and the co-editor of several anthologies, including Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992), Oppression, Privilege and Resistance: Theoretical Readings on Racism, Sexism and Heterosexism (2003), & The Atkins Diet and Philosophy (2006). She works in philosophy of food, American philosophy, and feminist philosophy. In 2022 she was awarded the John Dewey Society Award for Outstanding Achievement.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

It's August, and I am (yet again) revising the syllabus for my course in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies written by people living in the geographic boundaries of what is now the United States. That awkward, wordy description is intentional; each time I set out to write a syllabus for this course—the course that transformed me as a student, the course then called "American Philosophy" in the catalog—I confront the fact that I don't know what American philosophy means or should mean. I've changed the name of that very same course (I teach at my alma mater–it's literally the same course, at least on some solutions to the Ship of Theseus paradox) to "Philosophy Looks at the U.S." I advertise it as a course in which we explore how philosophers within this geographic area have reflected on some of the moments and movements from the 19th and early 20th centuries that have defined the country: settler colonialism, enslavement, immigration, urbanization, rural life...

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-lisa-heldke/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHNnTBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdc0524qLx4P5_E7IADdg0GClgc0wQrcWridNJjCW76mYN6Vkrk3QIL7bw_aem_jiMsj9KjEPuWKt1rNhvrCQ