Abstract

walt whitman writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature”. Naoko Saito is an American philosopher and something of a Whitmanesque philosophical poet. Saito’s book is “the product of many years spent reading and studying American philosophy”. She further indicates: “Mostly I have done this from a remote part of the world—far from America across the Pacific Ocean—and, like so many others, in a language that is not my own”. Saito is a scholar in and of translation.Saito states that the “tensioned relationship between Dewey and Emerson, and more broadly pragmatism and American transcendentalism... is carried forward into the present...