Philosophy Americana

 While I'm fired up about the American Studies (Culture) minor and the iron's hot, I should strike. I should get busy devising new courses, for our department's catalog, to anchor the reconfigured program. 

It shouldn't be hard to adapt my graduate-level MALA courses Democracy in America and Evolution in America. 

We already have an American Philosophy course in the catalog, the one my colleague (now chair) told me on the day of my hire I should never expect to get my mits on. Okay I said. Grudgingly.

But we don't have an Americana course. That's what we need.

Americana is the name of a big-tent musical genre. It's what they play on the campus radio station. Roots radio, they call it. Everything from Asleep at the Wheel to Miles Davis to Duke Ellington to the Gershwins to Tom T. Hall to the Jake-Leg Stompers to B.B. King to Lyle Lovett to Bill Monroe to the Neville Brothers to Cole Porter to John Prine to Webb Wilder to Dwight Yoakum to Warren Zevon. You never know what you're gonna get. It's a pluralistic playlist, just like America's supposed to be. "We believe that Americana music is inclusive of all people."

"Americana" is also philosopher Doug Anderson's proposed name (in Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture) for the philosophical attempt to understand the place of philosophy in the wider American culture. 

Doug's former student John Kaag is an adept practitioner of the genre. So was the late Robert Richardson (and so is his widow Annie Dillard).

Americana is also Carlin Romano's implicit template in America the Philosophical for the startling claim that America has in fact been richly fertile soil for the growth  and dissemination of New World-flavored Sophia.

Shouldn't we have a course about that? A course exploring the American pursuit of happiness ever since Jefferson, touching not just on the classic textbook names and notions (Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, Santayana, ...) but venturing as well into the realms of art, literature, music, poetry, politics, pop culture, whatever? A course that cares about Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Melville, Hawthorne, baseball, bourbon, The Simpsons, Star Trek, and whatever other popular personal enthusiasms--mine and others--we can squeeze in? A course that will get on the bus and come, like Simon and Garfunkel, to look for America? 

I think I can reassure our Tsarista esteemed chairperson that it will not at all conflict or compete with her American Philosophy course, with its wider-focus lens on the relation between philosophy and everything else American. If it needs a more disambiguating name we could call it something like Americana: ideas and ideals in the American Experience…OR, following John McDermott, just Streams of American Experience.

Well that was fun, now I just need to do the paper- and committee-work. And find some students.