A dive into the morass

Finished my syllabi for CoPhi and Environmental Ethics, and then...

I took a deep breath yesterday afternoon and dove into the bewildering morass also known as the Curriculog New Course Proposal online form. I have a feeling this is (in parts) too colorful for the gray-scale world of digitized data processing and paper pushing, but at least I'm swimming. Not drowning yet. Stand back and stand by, Kafka.

PHIL 3360: "Americana": Streams of Experience in American Culture

CATALOG. Exploring the American cultural experience and experiment, in light of classic American philosophy's traditional promotion of individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

COURSE DESCRIPTION. Our proposed course "Americana": Streams of Experience in American Culture is inspired, in name and aspiration, by the late philosopher John McDermott's book Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Both aim to identify and clarify "philosophical ideas at work in the task of understanding the fabric of American culture."

The course is intended to support MTSU's Minor in American Studies (the program heretofore known as American Culture).

Americana is the name of a big-tent musical genre. It's what they play on WMOT, our campus radio station. "Roots radio," they call it. It includes 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 (merely to begin sketching a broad and expanding spectrum). Listening to the Americana musical format can be a pleasurably novel experience. You never know what may come up next, that's the delight of the genre. It's a pluralistic playlist, much in the way Americans traditionally have wanted to conceive the USA as a pluralistic nation and culture. Just as musical Americana enthusiasts "believe that Americana music is inclusive of all people," enthusiasts of Americana as a cultural marker believe in a country dedicated to ideals of diversity and inclusion.

"Americana" is 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. 

Americana is also Carlin Romano's implicit template in America the Philosophical for the claim, surprising to those who say America lacks the philosophical sophistication and depth of older nations and cultures with (for instance) their Platos (Greece) and Descartes (France) and Kants (Germany), that  America has in fact been richly fertile soil for the growth and dissemination of a New World-inflected search for wisdom. 

(The books by McDermott, Anderson, and Romano mentioned above are examples of the sorts of texts the course might employ.)

"Americana" the course, exploring the American pursuit of happiness ever since Jefferson, will complement our standing course on American Philosophy, touching not just on the classic textbook names and notions (Pragmatism, Naturalism, Idealism, Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, Santayana) but venturing as well into all the realms of "the American Experience." One might consider documentarian Ken Burns' work on the Civil War, Baseball, Mark Twain, the Second World War, Country Music, Muhammad Ali, and on and on, to begin to get a sense of the vast breadth of that experience. (Next up: Thoreau.)

In any given iteration, of course, a more precisely focused subset of those topics is likely to be targeted. But all are eligible for inclusion under the pluralistic BIg Tent known as Americana. At a historical moment when so many are so concerned about the fate of the American Experiment, it seems like a course whose time has come.