Pragmatism in Black and White: Race, Domination, and Democratic Faith

Catalog description

This course interrogates the emergence of the 19th century philosophical movement known as pragmatism, focusing on William James and John Dewey, and investigates its intimations and resonances in African American intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin. We explore the crisis of religious certainty, and pragmatism’s attempt to provide an alternative framework for thinking about democratic governance. We also investigate the persistence of racism that politicized a group of thinkers who, in various ways, overlapped with pragmatists as they offered a normative vision of democracy to address domination.