I Am An American Philosopher: Thomas Alexander

-An Interview Series with John Capps-

“American philosophy… means a commitment to a set of interweaving histories as represented in a range of texts. It also reflects the fate of ideas in the New World.”

Thomas Alexander is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. A past-president of SAAP, he is the author of The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence and John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. With Larry Hickman he co-edited the two-volume The Essential Dewey. He is a recipient of SAAP’s Joseph L. Blau prize and received the society’s Herbert Schneider Award in 2019 for his “career-long achievement of distinguished contributions to the understanding of American Philosophy.”

What does American philosophy mean to you?

First, I take a descriptive approach. American philosophy means a broad study of the ideas and ideals that have arisen primarily but not exclusively in the United States. I take it to be one way of seeing philosophy historically rather than in terms of competing “-isms.” History is a major way culture is passed on. We need histories not essences. Ahistorical approaches actually end up being very parochial especially when they think they are being “rigorous.”

Thus, I am also very wary of “pragmatism” as a way of describing the movement embracing Peirce,  James, Mead, and Dewey. Peirce rejected the term for “pragmaticism.” James thought “radical empiricism” a better name for his mature thought. And Dewey opted for “humanistic naturalism” and then “cultural naturalism” as a name for his general philosophy. “Instrumentalism” was just his theory of inquiry.

So, American philosophy as an academic subject for me means a commitment to a set of interweaving histories as represented in a range of texts. It also reflects the fate of ideas in the New World. Of all those possibilities, I prefer “Humanistic Naturalism” as best describing my own orientation. I think of it as inherently pluralistic. Another general commitment is to try to see the actual in light of the possible. This also involves an attitude that we are all fallible learners.

How did you become an American philosopher?  

That is a complicated question in my case since both my father and his father were “American philosophers.” My grandfather Hartley Burr Alexander was President of all three divisions of the APA and my father, Hubert Griggs Alexander, was active in setting up the New Mexico-West Texas Philosophical Society as well as the program in philosophy at the University of New Mexico where he taught. I grew up with a sense of the role of philosophy in cultures East and West. One area my father developed was to offer courses on Hispanic and Latin American philosophy. One thing my father did which influenced me at a young age was to teach a televised humanities course on the local “NET” (later PBS) station. Sometimes he would take me to the studio and I could watch the show from the control room. I absorbed a lot of basic humanistic education that way.

On a personal level, my father’s gentle, reasonable temperament was a godsend during my adolescence which coincided with the tumultuous sixties.  I remember at one point he gave me a little volume of Montaigne, whose humane skepticism appealed to me. Then one day when I was in high school, I went to his study and asked him what would be a good introduction to philosophy. He gave me a yellowed war time paperback of The Apology, Crito and first two books of The Republic. Yet I have to say it was my father’s personality as much as anything that affected my ultimate attraction to philosophy and my philosophical outlook.

 I started my university studies at UNM (just down the street) thinking I would major in geology—historical geology. Most of the geology faculty, as it turned out, were petroleum geologists and they insisted that nothing new was going to happen in historical geology. I did not care for petroleum geology, so I abandoned geology.

A number of things during my university education pushed me toward philosophy. My father had only nudged me to take logic and the sequence in ancient and modern philosophy as part of any good liberal education. The course in ancient philosophy in particular fired me up. Intellectually, the questions I raised in my other courses tended to be philosophical (or so I was told by my teachers) and then the war in Vietnam brought moral and political issues to the fore, especially when my lottery number for the draft was drawn—34. I had a II-S “Student Deferment” until I finished college, but the war showed no signs of ending, especially once we went into Cambodia. And the moral and political issues could not be evaded.

Thankfully, Nixon decided to get us out of Vietnam. I hadn’t really thought about a future in which Vietnam did not play a looming part, so now with a more forgiving future, graduate school in philosophy seemed as good a choice as any. I was lucky to be admitted to the program at Emory University in Atlanta. Emory stressed the history of philosophy and was an island of pluralism in a sea of analytic programs. Also, several of the Emory  faculty were degreed from Columbia University and were students of John Herman Randall, Jr, so “American philosophy” meant “Columbia Naturalism,” more than “pragmatism.”  I took a seminar on James and Dewey from Jim Gouinlock and I was hooked, though at first more on James and The Principles of Psychology. Jim recommended that I submit a paper I had written on my grandfather for a newly formed group, The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. My paper was accepted and so I went with some dread based on what I had seen in professional meetings. The warmth and friendliness I encountered was decisive for me in embracing “American philosophy” as a calling.

How would you describe your current research?

I am working on a companion or reader’s guide to Experience and Nature. That book is a very complex work and is the touchstone for the rest of Dewey’s philosophy. I remember the first time I opened it up on a raw winter Atlanta night riding the bus back to my grim apartment (“The Kafka Arms” as my roommate and I called it) thinking “I’ll never understand this.” It is a rich but demanding text, especially if one approaches it with alien assumptions. It is one of the richest books in the discipline.

I have also been participating in a reading group going through Whitehead’s Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. I was exposed to Whitehead at Emory through Ivor Leclerc’s courses and it is good to reconnect with that thinker. Finally, I have been reading Spinoza, an old friend.

What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

I also have a great interest in ancient philosophy and the ancient world in general. My wife, Felicia Kruse Alexander, is a noted Peirce scholar and aesthetician (who studied under a real master, Carl Hausman), so we share those interests. I had to teach myself Peirce in graduate school, so it’s nice to have an expert close by to illuminate Peirce’s dark corners for me. We try to incorporate listening to music of all sorts in our lives. In the evenings she reads to me. Lately we have enjoyed the Navajo mysteries by Tony Hillerman and his daughter Anne. But we read a range of writers. We love the academic satire Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, one of the books that helped me survive graduate school.

What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

My favorite work in American philosophy, aside fromExperience and Nature, is Art as Experience. Dewey tells us that if we want to understand what experience is in its fullest sense, we should look at it in its artistic and aesthetic or “consummatory” manifestations. His analysis of that topic is surprisingly nuanced as well as a corrective to the one-sided readings of him as a “pragmatist.” Aside from those books, I recommend anything by Mark Johnson, especially his The Meaning of the Body. I think he is one of the finest American philosophers writing today.