Review of Talisse's Civic Solitude

To his credit, Talisse mentions humanities education. As a philosophy professor, I wholeheartedly agree that liberal arts education, which includes the humanities, is valuable not only in developing critical thinking skills but also in developing capabilities for better citizenship. However, it seems that humanities education (or liberal arts, or democratic education), although vital to democracy, is under great duress. So, the same political dynamics that give rise to polarization also undermine the education that affords the opportunity to develop depolarization.

Philosophy Now
Dec '25

Exit line

What a lovely end-of-semester gift from a student in Philosophy of Happiness. Volume II includes the transcendent 1910 letter to Henry Adams I sent them off with: " I am so happy I can stand it no longer!"

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m7rz2pr6ok2c

I Am An American Philosopher: Patricia Shields

Pragmatism is very much about the world of practice where people live and work. It seems that most philosophers—even American Philosophers—dwell in the world of ideas. I have come to see that I have a mediator role as a philosopher. I mediate and translate the ideas of pragmatism to people who live in the world of practice filled with problematic situations. I can translate and apply philosophical ideas in ways that are understood and used in the world of practice.

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-patricia-shields/

Henry James: the horror

"The 'new' America that Henry James encounters [in 1904], as he roams over it at the dawn of the American Century, leaves him little less than horrified." —John Banville https://go.nybooks.com/4a4bKwh

Dewey’s faith

 Barbara Stengel's contribution to the John Dewey Society Democracy Initiative. She contemplates how fear is operating against collective community action, and argues in favor of having a "working faith" in human nature to ground us. 

Stengel writes: "There is a critical truth in all this that John Dewey understood clearly, that was evident in the United States of 1939. Fear can't ground a community; it takes faith. The required faith is not a faith in the divine but a faith in the oh-so-human. The faith Dewey calls out and calls forth is a "working faith" in the possibilities of human nature, in the capacities that humans possess to address one another without "fear or favor.""