Cornel West
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Overview
This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.
Synopsis
This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.
Library Journal
Cornel West is a puzzle but one worth studying. An African American, he has risen to eminence first at Princeton and then at Harvard (where he is Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor and professor both of Afro-American studies and of the philosophy of religion). His long association with Afro-American studies does not exclude a global philosophical appetite; history, religion, culture, and philosophy are grist for his mill. His complexity necessitates a collection of essays like the 18 here. Still, readers must assemble their own pictures. There is a splendid essay by Hilary Putnam since the death of Quine arguably the greatest living American philosopher who has followed West since his undergraduate days. But Putnam's angle of vision is different from that of Josiah Ulysses Young III, who sees West as an American Emmanuel L vinas. In a telling "afterword," West calls himself a "Chekhovian Christian," but he would admit to being a L vinasian about human nature. He thinks of human beings as infinitely creative and able to rise above any limitations of culture and any system. He is also a Deweyite about social policies, arguing that we have to create a community based on mutual adjustment and the search for common interest. Every American intellectual ought to spend some time thinking about West, and every large library should give readers a chance by putting this book on their shelves. Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"There could be no more appropriate response to West's intellectual breadth than to assemble intellectuals and activists with diverse scholarly backgrounds and to ask them to engage critically with the full range of his work. The result is a book that can help us to assess West's achievement, while deepening our understanding of many of the questions raised in his extraordinary oeuvre. It also bears out the double-meaning in this book's title: for West is, indeed, one of the great critical readers of the American progressive tradition." Kwame Anthony Appiah, Harvard University
"Many of the contributions to this volume are written by members of a younger generation of scholars who have profited from West's pathbreaking writings. Their essays bring into sharp focus this question: is there anything that philosophers, theologians, or other intellectuals know, or anything they can do, that might help the black underclass in the US escape from what West calls 'a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness." Richard Rorty, Stanford University
"Every American intellectual ought to spend some time thinking about West, and every large library should give readers a chance by putting this book on their shelves". Library Journal
"Cornel West: a Critical Reader is worthwhile not only because it honors West, who is indeed worthy of our recognition, but also because it continues, and therefore lends credibility and possibility to, pragmatic philosophical discourse aimed at eliminating oppression through the expansion of democracy and improving our facility in the art of living." Ethics, Vol. 113, 2003