The origin story for this course is a bit unusual. State law in California requires students in the California State University system to engage in “comprehensive study” of American history and government, including “the historical development of American institutions and ideals.” Courses meeting this requirement are usually structured like surveys in American history: Instructors have to teach “significant events” taking place within the entire geographic range of the contemporary United States over a period of more than 100 years, and they have to describe and analyze the role of different ethnic and social groups in that history.
Crafting a philosophy course that met these objectives was a challenge. Standard surveys of American Philosophy that run from, say, Peirce to Rorty, tend to present a rather traditional set of philosophical problems concerning knowledge, meaning, truth, experience, and reality, that—for all the emphasis in pragmatism on action and practical effects—remain detached from the landscape of history unfolding ‘on the ground.’ It struck me, nonetheless, that this presented a real opportunity for our department and for our students: “American Institutions” courses are in extremely high demand on our campus (there are only a few approved options in a handful of departments), and, with the right approach, we could acquaint students with philosophy, not as something that occupies some abstract realm of ideas—as something entirely detached from material reality, in other words—but as a discipline that is both directly responsive to (and shapes) lived realities. (It also happens that, outside of my professional life, my intellectual passion is 19th-century American history, so I knew the course would give me a unique opportunity to connect these interests in the classroom in ways I have been starting to try to connect them in my own work.)
In constructing the course, I relied heavily on two texts: John Lysaker’s wonderful “Essaying America” and Scott Pratt and Erin McKenna’s collection American Philosophy from Wounded Knee to the Present. I don’t teach directly from either of those texts, though I do use Pratt’s Native Pragmatism to set up an important framework for the course: the distinction between what he calls the “colonial” and the “indigenous attitude.” But the former was really helpful for me as I tried to work out what became the overall course theme—an attempt to pose the question, “What is meant by the ‘American’ in ‘American philosophy’?” The latter text, from Pratt and McKenna, was then instrumental in my understanding of how to connect the philosophy to events in American history. It gave me the idea, for instance, for my favorite section of the course—a trio of readings from Frederick Jackson Turner, Simon Pokagon, and Ida B. Wells, that we set against the background of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. (Turner and Pokagon’s texts were first presented at the Fair—Turner’s as a speech and Pokagon’s printed on birch bark—and while Wells’ “Lynch Law in America” is from 7 years later, she had been a key figure, alongside Frederick Douglass, in contemporary critiques of the Fair, and her speech of 1900 pairs in striking ways with Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” of American history).
There has been a bit of tweaking of the course since I first taught it in 2020. But, on the narrative I have settled on, the semester begins with an attempt to problematize the course title, “The History of American Philosophy.” We ask: “What’s American about American philosophy?” “What are we talking about when we talk about philosophy?” And “What does it mean to ‘do’ the history of philosophy?” We then look at some celebratory and critical conceptions of Americanness to get our critical bearings and to practice some strategies for how to read philosophical texts. From there, the course follows a roughly chronological narrative. We begin with a project I call “mythologizing and demythologizing ‘American’,” developing key concepts and tools to think about the meaning and unfolding of American history in the work of figures from Cotton Mather to Ida B. Wells. From there, we move through American transcendentalism and pragmatism as philosophical traditions, looking at pragmatism “in action” (with an emphasis on education), before returning to the opening question of the meaning of American identity. This later section—especially the reading from Anzaldúa, which students usually single out as a favorite—produces really rich discussions about students’ own backgrounds and experiences, and about the meaning and value of personal narrative in the work of philosophy. Along the way, we engage philosophically with both major and minor events in American history: How did the massacre at Wounded Knee impact the form of native resistance to federal power? What is the reference in Douglass’ 4th of July speech to the Fugitive Slave Act, and how does it help us understand his rhetorical strategy? What does James’ recounting of the San Francisco earthquake on a visit to California in 1906 tell us about the meaning of pragmatism? This work often takes us behind or beyond the text: for instance, I talk about the Panic of 1837 and the Broad Street Riots in Boston to help students imagine what the general mood might have been like that August when, in front of a room of Harvard students, Emerson opened his speech “The American Scholar” by celebrating “the survival of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more.” In doing this kind of work, my hope for the course is that students will come to think of historical texts, not just as artifacts, or as ‘merely’ preserving theories or abstract ideas, but as modes of access to a world—as written by embodied human beings (sometimes quite literally by hand), whose interests, concerns, environments, beliefs, identities, and concerns show up in the text, if we know how to look… that they will come to see philosophy as a tool for understanding those worlds.
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Robin M. Muller
Robin M. Muller is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Her primary field of research is the intersection of phenomenology, including critical phenomenology, and the human sciences. She teaches broadly in the history of (American, European, and Africana) philosophy.
