The book describes the ways in which American thinkers and artists in the first two decades of the twentieth century challenged notions that a single principle explained all relevant phenomena, opting instead for a pluralistic world in which many truths, goods, and beauties coexisted. It argues that the bracketing of the idea that all knowledge was integrated allowed for a new appreciation of the importance of context and contingency.

Henry Adams (great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams) asserts that his conventional education was defective because it did not prepare him to live in a world transformed by the new science and technology. This autobiography provides an insightful exploration of the tumultuous age in which he lived.

At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at “the center of world awareness,” thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of “American culture”? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Could scientific method rescue truth from error, illusion, and myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a society, to order in the world? Answers to such questions promised intellectual and moral stability in an age haunted by the memory of world war and the possibility of future devastation on an even greater scale. Yet other key figures rejected the search for a center, asserting that freedom lay in the dispersion of cultural energies and the plurality of American experiences. In probing the centering impulse of the era, At the Center offers a unique perspective on the United States at the pinnacle of its power.

“[A]n outstanding book that will serve as a fine supplement (and guide) to important primary texts in early twentieth-century continental philosophy” (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy offers a lucid and engaging introduction to the major works of French and German philosophy in the first half of the century. Leonard Lawlor takes as his starting point the original publication of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics in 1903, and his endpoint as the original publication Foucault’s The Thought of the Outside in 1966. Lawlor interprets key texts by major figures in the continental tradition, such as Bergson and Foucault, as well as Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Taken together, his assessment of these figures illustrates the major theoretical trends of the time―immanence, difference, multiplicity, and the overcoming of metaphysics.

This book is a comprehensive overview of the history of modern American thought and examines a wide range of modern thought and thinkers from 1860, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in the United States, to the end of the twentieth century. The focus of this volume is on the destabilizing effects of modern challenges to notions of fixed order and absolute truths, and the contradictory consequences for philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic thought. The intellectual response to the unprecedented changes of this era produced visions of both liberation from the hierarchies of the past and new forms of control and constraint. One of the central contradictions in modern thought was between biological and cultural ideas of social, psychological, and moral order. This is the first work to provide an interpretive vision of the entire period under consideration. Topics covered include evolutionary thought, philosophical Pragmatism, ideas of race and gender, pluralism and cultural relativism, Cold War Liberalism, science and religion, feminist thought, evolutionary psychology, and the late twentieth-century Culture Wars. Thinkers from William James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman through Judith Butler and Cornel West are analyzed as historical figures. This volume is an ideal resource for a general audience as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the field of American intellectual history.

This book presents an antidote to the self-destructive war between educational conservatives and progressives, arguing that each has only part of the solution in what should be a productive dialectic between experience and concepts--Outlines the rich tradition of educational thought we have already created in this country, suggesting ways to apply it to our current reform efforts--Provides a new paradigm for re-conceptualizing our educational past, urging us to move in the direction of our best and most characteristic literary and philosophical thinkers--Critiques the usual academic discourse on education and suggests alternatives through his lively and direct style.