You are playing all my favorites. What I see running through most of the folk you cite is pragmatism. Truth is not in thought, but in experience, from Emerson through to Sennett. I’d suggest even Arendt, with her concepts of rootlessness, solves for it in effect with neighborliness.
Thanks, Cort. My favorite American philosopher is Charles Peirce, the "father of pragmatism." Sennett cites Peirce's pragmatism approvingly in his book The Craftsman, but I've never read it.
I love Sennett’s urbanism. I know Pierce from my teacher Cornel West, whose prophetic pragmatism put him in a genealogy going back to Emerson, followed by James, etc. all the way to Richard Rorty. cf Cornel’s American Evasion of Philosophy.
You test Emerson’s “nation of friends” against urban life, public space, and neighborliness. The movement from aphorism to street, Samaritan to sidewalk, shows how political order can arise from shared action without intimacy, coercion--or moral theater. ! - Thanks yet again.
Thank you, William. You've hit on it. When we insist on public "intimacy" or resort to coercion or moral theater, we are coping with--or selfishly taking advantage of--a thinned-out public life. But neighborliness can thicken it.
You are playing all my favorites. What I see running through most of the folk you cite is pragmatism. Truth is not in thought, but in experience, from Emerson through to Sennett. I’d suggest even Arendt, with her concepts of rootlessness, solves for it in effect with neighborliness.
Thanks, Cort. My favorite American philosopher is Charles Peirce, the "father of pragmatism." Sennett cites Peirce's pragmatism approvingly in his book The Craftsman, but I've never read it.
I love Sennett’s urbanism. I know Pierce from my teacher Cornel West, whose prophetic pragmatism put him in a genealogy going back to Emerson, followed by James, etc. all the way to Richard Rorty. cf Cornel’s American Evasion of Philosophy.
What a book! I just ordered it. Thanks for the tip.
*Peirce
You test Emerson’s “nation of friends” against urban life, public space, and neighborliness. The movement from aphorism to street, Samaritan to sidewalk, shows how political order can arise from shared action without intimacy, coercion--or moral theater. ! - Thanks yet again.
Thank you, William. You've hit on it. When we insist on public "intimacy" or resort to coercion or moral theater, we are coping with--or selfishly taking advantage of--a thinned-out public life. But neighborliness can thicken it.