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>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: There's a whole matter of American culture which is so fascinating.
Founded by philosophers: Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, I mean, obviously.
And yet a deep aversion
to disciplined philosophical thought
shared by most people.
>> JOHN LYSAKER: When I'm working with any set of texts in the United States I certainly
don't feel American. I don't think America as a culture is particularly philosophical.
I don't think it's hospitable to philosophers.
>>HILARY PUTNAM: France is something else. A philosophy book in France is a best-seller.
Somebody like Derrida is literally a star. He sells fifty-thousand copies.
[applause]
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: The philosophy of the frontier.
The "real men" were the vanguard
forged their way, cut their way through wilderness
and then the women, children, and teachers
thinkers brought up the rear if they were included at all.
[Music: La Marseillaise]
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: I mean I don't know what this is like maybe in France.
I mean there are probably, you know. If you're...
I'm sure there are a lot of practical-minded people in France.
It's not like everyone is like a Gilles Deleuze, or whatever, you know?
So I'm sure you can, you know, alienate your parents by becoming a philosopher in France
too, probably.
>> DWAYNE TUNSTALL: I would read my mother's Ebony magazines.
And they had an advertisement about Cornel West's Keeping Faith.
And I just saw this brother with a huge afro.
And the title just hooked me:
Keeping Faith: Race and Philosophy in America.
And I thought, "Ok, race."
I had no idea what this philosophy business was.
[music]
>> DWAYNE TUNSTALL: But I was interested in reading things about race at the time.
So I decided to order his book.
But from that book I became interested in studying the history of philosophy
and I came across the dialogues of Plato.
And for several years that's all I knew of philosophy: Cornel West and Plato.
And I know that's an odd combination, but that was my introduction to philosophy.
>> ERIN MCKENNA: Thinking, that was definitely stressed in my family:
Sitting around and thinking about ideas and arguing about ideas
was but I don't think anyone saw it as a profession.
I think that switch was a little hard for some in my family.
My father said this when I said I'll be a philosophy major he said this was a phase.
You'll outgrow this.
>> DWAYNE TUNSTALL: My mother thought that it was a phase that I would grow out of.
>> ERIN MCKENNA: I think he was more worried about the practicalities of it.
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: My dad wanted me to become a TV repairman.
>> ERIN MCKENNA: There have been some in my extended family who pursued things in an idealistic
but did not lead to self-support, and so were not practical.
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: Because he thought people would always need their TVs fixed.
But who the hell needs, you know, the next move in the freewill debate, you know what
I mean?
Uh, nobody.
>> ERIN MCKENNA: So sitting around and dreaming about ideas, there was a dangerous side to
that.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Are you just drifting off into dreamland, in mere philosophy?
>> ERIN MCKENNA: [laughs] Examples.
I have a cousin who has worked on a mechanism to sail icebergs down from the North Atlantic
to solve California's water problems.
My father, himself, patented a sonic cleanser of some kind that didn't actually take off.
Another cousin who was brilliant but had money and kind of hung out and talked to people
and drank too much and died early.
So there's that side to a life of the mind.
And that same cousin did things like play nude golf and, you know...
A little eccentric.
And there are members of the family that are eccentric.
[laughs]
>> JOHN LYSAKER: My parents did not bat an eye when I came home and said I was going
to major in philosophy
and go to graduate school
at the age of eighteen.
They thought that was great.
>> DWAYNE TUNSTALL: My father was like, "No. There's no way."
"Philosophy? That's not even a real job. What do you do?"
>> JOHN LYSAKER: I didn't have chores.
I read all the time.
I grew up in Chappaqua, New York and Princeton, New Jersey, which were two extremely affluent
areas.
I was spoiled.
>> DWAYNE TUNSTALL: He's going, "That's not a job."
Because he grew up all his life in manual labor, pretty much hard, back-breaking work
at a lumber mill.
And he didn't recognize what I was doing as work.
>> JOHN LYSAKER: So I had what Aristotle said you might need or want for philosophy, which
is lots of leisure.
So I don't know if this is white, male, bourgeois privilege.
>> RICHARD RORTY: I was born in New York City in 1931.
My parents were left-wing journalists, associated at the time with the Communist Party.
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: I'm not sure when I got the concept of "philosophy" itself.
Probably pretty early.
>> RICHARD RORTY: My father published a couple of books of poems,
worked in an advertising agency.
>> JOHN STUHR: My mother was a philosophy professor at a time when there were virtually
no women teaching philosophy in the United States.
>> RICHARD RORTY: My mother contributed articles to magazines like Harper's and Commonweal,
mainly on race relations.
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: I grew up in quite a bookish house.
>> JOHN STUHR: And so I grew up in a household that had books by Whitman and Emerson and
James in the library.
>> RICHARD RORTY: My parents had copies of Plato and Nietzsche on the shelves
so I had read a little of both of those men before going to college.
>> JOHN STUHR: Other kids had dens; we had a library.
>> RICHARD RORTY: I think that my father was puzzled by my decision to specialize in philosophy.
He had nothing in particular against it.
I think my mother was perhaps more pleased than my father.
My mother's father had been a theologian and she admired her father and thought that her
son was more or less following in her father's footsteps.
>> JOHN E. SMITH: I was in a theological seminary.
>> LARRY HICKMAN: I was contemplating a career in the ministry.
>> LUCIUS OUTLAW: I was thinking I was going to go into the ministry.
>> JAMES PAWELSKI: I think a lot of people, certainly not all, but I think a lot of people
who are interested in philosophy maybe began by being interested in religion. That's certainly
the case with me.
>> LARRY HICKMAN: I took some philosophy courses and decided that that was really what I wanted
to do.
>> LUCIUS OUTLAW: And then decided, as I say, that the "broad and crooked" was probably
a lot more fun than the "straight and narrow".
>> MICHAEL HODGES: I had questions about matters of religion, for example.
>> JAMES PAWELSKI: My father's a minister.
My parents are very conservative evangelical Christians and I was brought up in a very
conservative way.
>> JOHN E. SMITH: Religion presses philosophy to stick with the big questions.
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: This is surely one of the more religious civilizations that's ever
existed.
I mean, people are very, very intense about their religion here.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Well, American philosophy in its first sort of formal garb came out
of New England and therefore it came out of this Calvinist background.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: If we think about the important people in the American philosophical
tradition, I'll mention, but won't say much about, Jonathan Edwards.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Jonathan Edwards understood that he was engaged in philosophical, not
just theological, dialogue when he was working with the question of free will.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: The person I start with is Ralph Waldo Emerson.
>> MICHAEL HODGES: I would start with Emerson.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: He was, I think, fifth in the line of ministers in the Unitarian
Church.
>> ANNE ROSE: They were driven by ideas to do things that their parents could never have
imagined.
>> RUSSELL GOODMAN: He decided that he couldn't be a minister, didn't want to be a minister.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Because he doesn't believe a lot of what that tradition tells him he
ought to believe.
>> ANNE ROSE: Even Emerson giving up his pulpit.
I mean, he was part of the center of the Unitarian world,
Giving up this great job.
He was the minister of the Second Church of Boston, a big deal.
You know, but he didn't want to administer communion, but he couldn't do it.
e didn't hear that message.
So he gives it up!
>> CRISPIN SARTWELL: I think philosophy and religion are very closely related.
I mean I think essentially they address the same set of questions
in many ways.
>> JOHN LACHS: A lot of people of course turn to religion when they raise these issues.
But many people turn to philosophy.
And ask questions that philosophers, they hope, can answer.
And frequently don't.
>> LUCIUS OUTLAW: I was studying philosophy and sort of became intrigued by this sort
of what I at the time thought was this quest to be rationable and reasonable that I found
very attractive since I had grown up in circumstances that I thought were pretty unreasonable;
Namely, you know, racial apartheid.
>> JOHN LACHS: I lived through the Second World War in Hungary.
And a lot of people died and there were some very tough times. I mean there was actually
fighting all around where we were.
I was a little boy.
>> LUCIUS OUTLAW: You know, white supremacy and, you know, segregation required a lot
of maintenance.
Every white child had to be taught the terms and how to maintain it through the way in
which they would conduct themselves in being white.
[sound of door slamming]
>> JOHN LACHS: I became acquainted fairly early in life as a result of that with death.
And that raises questions even in a young child's mind as to what this mess was all
about.
>> LUCIUS OUTLAW: We were not going to go to the same school. We were not going to go
to the same church. We are not going to eat in the same restaurants. We were not going
to sit in the same place in the movie theatres. We were not going to be on the same sports
teams until...
At least not before late 1960s.
>> JOHN LACHS: So I was devoted fairly early in life to finding out answers to the big
questions:
Questions like, is there a God and, if so, how does he relate to us?
What is the nature of man?
>> LUCIUS OUTLAW: I was attracted by people who seemed to be making reasonable sense out
of things so I was like, "Oh, ok, this can be helpful since I'm living with something
that I think is pretty unreasonable and not very good."