American Philosophy

It looks like they assigned me, in absentia, to teach American Philosophy in Spring 2011.

I’m fighting a perverse wish to teach the whole semester on Whitehead. But I can’t decide whether that would be an insult to America, England, both, or neither, and unless the answer is clearly “neither” than I don’t want to do it.

On the one hand, Whitehead was about as English in the best sense as a person can be. And Process and Reality was of course delivered as the Gifford Lectures in Scotland. But on the other hand, it’s kind of hard to think of Whitehead’s philosophy without thinking of Harvard, isn’t it? (And for me at least, hard to think of Harvard without thinking of Whitehead.)