Portraits of American Philosophy

This text is a collection of select lectures from the American Philosophical Association's John Dewey Lectures. They are chosen for their autobiographical nature and all focus on the orator's career and calling as a philosopher. There is a fairly even split of male and female philosophers from the last half century, the most notable of whom is Harry Frankfurt, known for his work On Bullshit. The philosophers in question are all former or current academics, and many of their reflections focus on going to school and transitioning from student to teacher roles, while conducting research and attending to post-graduate demands. Claudia Card's contribution is interesting for the way it exposes academic philosophers' gender-biases and the social situation of 'doing philosophy' in a university setting. Philosophy appears in every lecture, but more as a dramatic or literary prop than an object of thought. * Book News, Inc. *
These Dewey lectures, written by some of the leaders of the field, provide an informative and thought-provoking perspective on the ways philosophy and academia more generally have changed over the last fifty years. Practicing philosophers, and anyone with a historical or sociological curiosity about the discipline of philosophy, will find much of interest here. -- Susan Wolf, University of North Carolina