Outline

PHIL 317, History of American philosophy, Fall 2026

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Unit 1

Week 1

Reading Assignment Original
Kant, Critique Of Judgment all PDF
Roelofs, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic all PDF

Week 2

Reading Assignment Original
Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light all PDF
Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue all PDF

Week 3

Reading Assignment Original
Apess, Selections all PDF
Occom, Selections all PDF
Pratt, Native Pragmatism, chap. 1 all PDF

Week 4

Reading Assignment Original
Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (“Overture”) all PDF
Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (“Slavery and White Self-Fashioning”) all PDF
Jefferson, Notes On State Of Virginia all PDF
Wheatley, Selections all PDF

Unit 2

Week 5

Reading Assignment Original
Emerson, “Self-Reliance” all PDF
Emerson, “The American Scholar” all PDF

Week 6

Reading Assignment Original
Cavell, “Aversive Thinking” all PDF
Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson” all PDF
Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, introduction all PDF
Emerson, “Circles” all PDF
Emerson, “Experience” all PDF

Week 7

Reading Assignment Original
Fuller, Summer on the Lakes (excerpts) all PDF
Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century all PDF

Week 8

Reading Assignment Original
Douglass, “Pictures and Progress” all PDF
Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro” all PDF

Unit 3

Week 9

Reading Assignment Original
Peirce, “Fixation of Belief” all PDF
Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” all PDF

Week 10

Reading Assignment Original
James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” all PDF
James, “On A Certain Blindness” all PDF
James, Pluralistic Universe (excerpts) all PDF

Week 11

Reading Assignment Original
Dewey, Art as Experience (excerpt) all PDF

Week 12

Reading Assignment Original
Addams, “Subjective Necessity” all PDF
Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (excerpt) all PDF

Unit 4

Week 13

Reading Assignment Original
DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (“Dawn of Freedom”) all PDF
DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (“Of Booker T Washington”) all PDF
DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”) all PDF
DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (“Sorrow Songs”) all PDF

Week 14

Reading Assignment Original
DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art” all PDF
Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” all PDF
Locke, “Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” all PDF
Locke, “Values and Imperatives” all PDF

Week 15

Reading Assignment Original
Anzaldua, Borderlands, chap. 1 all PDF
Anzaldua, Borderlands, chap. 7 all PDF
Anzaldua, Borderlands, preface all PDF
Marti, “Our America” all PDF
Zitkala-Ša, “Why I Am a Pagan” all PDF

Week 16

Reading Assignment Original
Morrison, Playing in the Dark (excerpts) all PDF
Taylor, Black Is Beautiful, chap. 1 all PDF