Welcome to our Applied Philosophy Lyceum, which we’ve been hosting for 34 years now. Thanks to Dean Lyons and the College of Liberal Arts for their support… and thanks as always to MTSU News for helping us get word of this event out to our campus community. One small correction: we did not “begin as two separate departments”... but we in the now-singular Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies are indeed united in our shared mission to bring the best and brightest public-facing scholars to middle Tennessee for our respective Lyceum and Colloquium events year after year.
(And NOTE, we’ll be doing this again next Friday when we welcome Professor Vanessa Wills from George Washington University. She’ll be talking about love and friendship. But first…)
It is my honor to launch our spring Lyceum season by introducing a speaker I am proud now to have recruited twice: first to serve as Secretary of the William James Society, and now as our speaker this afternoon.
Professor Alexis Dianda received her PhD from The New School for Social Research in 2017. Upon completion of her PhD, she joined Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Leslie Center for the Humanities. In 2019, Professor Dianda arrived at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where she teaches for the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy, Politics, and the Public program.
Professor Dianda’s teaching interests touch upon American philosophy, feminist theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy. She is the author of Varieties of Experience: William James after the linguistic turn (Harvard University Press, 2023), which insists that “lived experience must remain the bedrock of our philosophical reflections.”
Among her courses at Xavier: Ethics as Introduction to Philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir, and Philosophy of Hope.
But why, really, have I been so eager to recruit Professor Dianda? It must be because she says things like: “I’m a crazy dog lady… I grew up with dogs and have always been a dog lover.” (Me too. My dad was a vet.) Her pups, pit bull mixes like one of mine, are called Henry Adams, Tillie Olsen, and Huck Finn.
Plus, she reads Montaigne and Melville. So of course she knows all about “fractured selves,” as we’re about to hear.
Welcome to MTSU, Professor Dianda.
“American philosophers are philosophers in the business of offering a vision of America: its people, its principles, its ideals. In this way, the Americanness of American philosophy is, I think, bound to a distinctive impulse toward national self-creation. American philosophers, in other words, are those who take America, the concept, the country, the people, as their object of conceptual and critical inquiry.” Alexis Dianda*What does American philosophy mean to you?
This is a really difficult question. I usually give two different answers depending on the context. The first is to say that American philosophers share a certain set of philosophical assumptions: they’re pluralists, fallibilists, anti-foundationalists, and anti-representationalists. These features do cover whole swaths of American philosophical thought, and they’re helpful for thinking about pragmatism in particular, which is what most people think American philosophy is. But appealing to these philosophical commitments doesn’t really go very far toward explaining why we exclude from the category people like Derrida or Foucault. And it also doesn’t help us understand why we include (or want to include) people like Santayana, Cooper, Cavell, or Du Bois... (continues)
*Alexis Dianda is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University. She is the author of The Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn (Harvard, 2023) as well as articles and chapters on the work of James and Richard Rorty. Her other research and teaching interests include feminist theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy.
https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-alexis-dianda/
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