Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy

Contributors

{  } Contributors  Douglas R. Anderson is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He works on the history of philosophy and American philosophy especially, and is interested in philosophy’s relationship with other dimensions of culture. He is the author of Philosophy Americana (2006) and of two books about the philosophy of Peirce, in addition to numerous other publications. StanleyBates isProfessorEmeritusofPhilosophyatMiddleburyCollege, where he continues to teach in his retirement. He has written on ethical themes in the work of Cavell, Emerson, and Wittgenstein, and on various topics in the philosophy of art. At present, he is working on a book about moral perfectionism. Philip J. Cafaro is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. His scholarly interests center on environmental ethics, virtue ethics, wild lands preservation, and population and consumption issues. He is the author of Thoreau’s Living Ethics (2004) and has contributed to various philosophical journals and edited collections. Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor, Emeritus, of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, and former President of the American Philosophical Association. He is one of the most illustrious philosophers of recent times, having earned wide acclaim for his work, which centers on the intersection of American, continental, and analytic philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, and the arts. He is the author of eighteen books, including contributors  Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), The Senses of Walden (1972), The Claim of Reason (1979), Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Disowning Knowledge (1987), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990), A Pitch of Philosophy (1994), Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), and a philosophical memoir titled Little Did I Know (2010). Jonathan Ellsworth is an independent scholar who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During his time as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he also taught in the Philosophy Department at Wheaton College. His publications include “Apophasis and Askêsis in Mystical Theology,” in Rethinking Philosophy of Religion, edited by Philip Goodchild (2004), along with other articles and book reviews. Paul Friedrich is Professor Emeritus of Social Thought, Anthropology, and Linguistics at the University of Chicago, where he is still actively teaching. His many books include The Meaning of Aphrodite (1978), The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy (1986), and Harmony in Babel: Selected Poems and Translations (2007). Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. He is author of Wisdom in Love (2005) and editor of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide (2010), in addition to other literary and philosophical publications. He teaches widely in the history of philosophy, moral psychology, and existential thought, and is currently working on a book about emotion and cognition. Russell B. Goodman is Regents Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His books include American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (1990) and Wittgenstein and William James (2002), and he is currently at work on a history of American philosophy. He has written on a variety of figures and themes in the history of ideas—European, Asian, and Anglo-American—ranging from Neoplatonism to pragmatism. Robert Kuhn McGregor is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Springfield. His scholarship is focused on American and environmental contributors  history, as well as modern English literature, and he is the author of A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau’s Study of Nature (1997). Edward F. Mooney is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Syracuse University. The titles of two of his recent books convey the range of his interests: On Søren Kierkegaard (2007) and Lost Intimacy in American Thought (2009). He writes and teaches on a number of thinkers whose work lies at the intersection of philosophy, religion, poetry, and literature. James D. Reid has previously taught at the University of Chicago, Colorado College, and the College of William of Mary, in addition to the United States Air Force Academy. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan State College of Denver. He has written on the philosophical legacy of Kant, Fichte, Heidegger, and Dilthey, among others, and his essays have appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, the Kantian Review, and the Journal of the History of Philosophy. His forthcoming book is called Heidegger’s Moral Ontology. Alfred I. Tauber is Professor of Philosophy and Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine at Boston University, where he directed the Center...