American Philosophy Quotes

“Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past. *”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“Looking back, I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn’t the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the stuff of everyday life. The”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“The love of wisdom was not bound in academic journals that no one read; it rather permeated all aspects of human existence.”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“Royce’s lecture on Hegel told me why: We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and erelong, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody. I”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“According to Wallace, we’re not fated to be “imperially alone” at the center of our little “skull-sized kingdoms,” but have the rare and precious choice to venture outside with others. Whether we do is completely up to us, but this choice of togetherness beckons even, and most importantly, when we feel the most cut off. *”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“Vellum” is another name for skin—at one point, philosophy was bound up in the stuff. I reached down to pick up James’s first edition of Samuel Clarke’s A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, published in 1705, and gently fingered its cold white surface as if it were a sacred relic. The term “philosophical corpus” had never made sense until now. I turned the book over. Tenderly. It was a little body: skin wrapped around something beautiful and inexplicable. Putting it under my arm, I turned to the back corners of the library. Tucked away on one of the back shelves was Josiah Royce’s library: Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Mill, Dilthey, Lotze, Tarde, Boole. These books were filled with marginalia. I took a quick look at one of Royce’s jottings—something written in Greek about God and strife—but then grabbed the books that I could carry. I would think about marginalia later. This wasn’t just any set of books. It was the bridge between European and American philosophy. That afternoon at dusk I had the unshakable sense that I was missing the most important part of West Wind, and over the course of three years I saw that this premonition was more correct than I could have known. Instead”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“By this point American pragmatism was in decline. Academic philosophy had begun to make its unfortunate ascent to the penthouse of the ivory tower. The idea that philosophers might have something useful to say about foreign policy or religion or even life was slowly going out of fashion. Hocking sensed this trend and fought the dying of philosophy’s light for more than half a century.”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“I ate my breakfast—the same banana and toast I’d eaten for a decade—and wondered how philosophy had managed to lose its personal character. In graduate school I was taught to carefully ignore the personalities that gave rise to philosophical arguments. But this was almost impossible when it came to American philosophy.”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“A hundred years ago, men began to compete with women in the field of philosophy. Before then, men stole ideas from them, were inspired by them, and relied on them for domestic and material support but rarely considered them peers.”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“As a professional philosopher, I very rarely hyperventilate while doing research, but Peirce was a notorious recluse. Most of his books had been sold or carried off to Harvard at the end of his life, but somehow this little treasure—Peirce’s own copy of his first and most famous publication—had ended up here. *”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story

“When you come to the end of life, all you have are the middle years, those fallible middle years that you haven’t spent altogether wisely.”
― John Jacob Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story