The Latino character of American pragmatism
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Copyright 2011 Fordham University Press. All rights reserved. Let me begin with an anecdote. Last fall I was teaching a class in American philosophy. After class a student from Colombia said to me, "La filosofia de James y Dewey me encanta, pero no puedo concebir que estos filosofos sean Americanos" ("Professor, I love James's and Dewey's philosophy but I can't think of them as American philosophers"). Why, for someone acquainted with both American and Latin culture, is the philosophy of Dewey and James experienced as being (on the whole) more Latin than American? What could this mean? And does this experience not call into question the standard effort to present pragmatism as the intellectual reflection of American culture? Finding answers to these questions raises issues concerning philosophy, culture, and the relation between them.
