Abstract

Carlin Romano’s book, America the Philosophical,1 challenges philosophy and America, while also celebrating evidence of philosophical energy in American culture in general. Romano claims that in America we find a true agora, a unique marketplace of truth and argument. Yet, in his view, academic philosophy fails miserably in its focus on issues of knowledge and its lack of public relevance. He then draws on a wide spectrum of persons outside of academic philosophy as models for how philosophy should be done. In the philosophy camp, he sees value in classic pragmatism and the contemporary work of Richard Rorty. Rorty, an insider in the tradition of professional analytic philosophy, came to reject its...