• American Philosophy

  • A Love Story
  • By: John Kaag
  • Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
  • Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (475 ratings)

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American Philosophy  By  cover art

American Philosophy

By: John Kaag
Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
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Publisher's summary

The epic wisdom contained in a lost library helps the author turn his life around.

In American Philosophy, John Kaag - a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career - stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy - self-reliance, pragmatism, the transcendent - and sees them in a 21st-century context.

Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy. After studying under Harvard's philosophical four - William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and George Herbert Palmer - he held the most prestigious chair at the university for the first three decades of the 20th century. And when his teachers eventually died, he collected the great books from their libraries (filled with marginalia) and combined them with his own rare volumes at his family's estate. And there they remained for nearly 80 years, a time capsule of American thought.

Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is an invigorating investigation of American pragmatism and the wisdom that underlies a meaningful life.

©2016 John Kaag (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

What listeners say about American Philosophy

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Awesome Book! But..

Would you consider the audio edition of American Philosophy to be better than the print version?
Yes, except the reader kept pronouncing Peirce's name wrong. Charles Sanders Peirce's last name should be pronounced like "purse" not "pierce."

What did you like best about this story?
The blend of American philosophy and the author's own search for meaning.

What about Josh Bloomberg’s performance did you like?
Remember, Peirce-->purse not "pierce."

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Pretty much!

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38 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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American Philosophy In Action

Would you listen to American Philosophy again? Why?

For sure. It's packed with great historical information and then put into in a present day narrative. In this case, it's the author's own life showing us why knowing American philosophy is applicable and necessary. Loved the info on the editions of the books as well.
A must for any book collector!

Have you listened to any of Josh Bloomberg’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This is the first one I have heard. He does a great job.

If you could give American Philosophy a new subtitle, what would it be?

How to live an American life according to the pioneers who came before...

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31 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Compelling!

Interesting philosophical lesson interwoven with a compelling story. Narration was superb with changes in intonation for different poems and characters.

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27 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A Messy Book about a Messy Philosophy of Love

Which character – as performed by Josh Bloomberg – was your favorite?

Bloomberg reads well, but he needed a coach for some of the pronunciation. For most of the book he mispronounces C.S. Pierce as "Peer-ce" (which, to be fair, is how it looks). For the introduction and last chapter and a half, though, he gets it right -- to sound like "Purse."

There are other technical terms -- such as "misanthropy" -- that he just misses too.

I know I'm being picky, but this is philosophy, and it's distracting to get the sense that our narrator may not know it as well as our author does.

Any additional comments?

Inasmuch as this is a story, it comes up short. Ostensibly the account of how our narrator dug himself out of an experience of what we might call false consciousness – life in an unhappy marriage with a range of career choices before him – most of this is instead a record of the cataloguing of the library of William Ernest Hocking, a mostly forgotten one-time titan of American philosophy. We don’t get the details of a traditional love story – in fact, all of the romance between Kaag and the woman he eventually marries would fit in a handful of pages.

Of course, I realize the intent of that subtitle. It’s a reference to any number of potential love stories: not just Kaag and Carol, but also Kaag and the library, Hocking and his own wife, Hocking and life itself, and Kaag and a discipline he’d embraced only through his intellect rather than his full emotional register. We don’t get details of the meaningful but mundane romance that brings Kaag his new wife. Instead, we get a range of biographical sketches and interpretations of philosophical trends.

I am, in many ways, the target audience here. I’m a scholar of American literature, and I know the literary siblings of the philosophers who stand on center stage here. (That’s literally true in the case of William and Henry James, but it’s metaphorically true of the many writers who come in as friends of the philosophers in question.) I know the joy of finding some puzzle piece of information or insight in a forgotten text, and I have tried to share it with others myself. (And I have generally failed.)

So, my verdict is that this one is too much of a mess to be a full success. It’s part memoir, though I took it for fiction, and it’s part philosophical treatise. It fails to come entirely together… but I want to put an asterisk to that observation.

It takes a while, but Kaag eventually gives us a wide and working definition of what distinguishes American philosophy from the more familiar continental strain. There are vast schools of thought that find their roots in Descartes, that take as axiomatic that we begin thinking as individual selves. As Kaag develops a series of interconnected arguments, he presents us with a compelling alternative. That is, some thinkers (such as C.S. Pierce) proposed that our experience originates not in the self but in our interaction with others. It is not so much the thunderbolt of “I think, therefore I am,” as it is – and I paraphrase from my own understanding – “We love one another, therefore we are.”

That, of course, is the central notion of “love” at the heart of the subtitle, and it’s a powerful one. (It’s just one that I’m convinced could have come more efficiently and with more power in some other form – memoir would be fine, but it would need to be memoir that didn’t so fully parrot the structure of the novel and instead found some fresh approach.)

In fact, while I find the form of this book disappointing, I’m genuinely inspired by what Kaag has to share in these seemingly dry old characters. As he tells us, American philosophy stood in contrast to the continentals in that it attacked the problems of what it means to live an everyday life. It found a middle ground between pure logic and the abstract contemplation of morality. Because the founders of American philosophy, from Emerson through William James, Pierce, Josiah Royce, and eventually Hocking himself, wanted always to explore “experience” (something I knew to be at the heart of Emersonian thought but that it has taken Kaag to help me understand in this new light) they wrote about overlapping ideas.

In other words, one reason we have seen the tradition of American philosophy wither is that it is, from its axiomatic beginnings, messy. It doesn’t start with self, but with community, with a people between or among whom lies the potential for love. (For Emerson and his literary sibling Whitman, that love is both between individuals and in the nature of citizenship.)

So, to the asterisk in my judgement of the book over all: Kaag’s very moving take on the nature of this tradition is messy enough that it seems to have inspired a messy structure in its work. (And, if you want to see “messy” done masterfully, check out almost any of Emerson’s essays.) I think this book falls short of the masterpiece it suggests, but I think it does so in part because Kaag, for all that he embraces this tradition, sees it as a tradition that failed to keep its foothold in our culture. To put it sadly, he’s fallen in love with a ghost, and he can’t quite bring himself to pronounce his new love dead.

There’s real potential in the metaphor of the library, a decaying place that stood for a generation as the ultimate coming together of a century of the finest thinkers our nation could produce. And note that the library, put into an order that perhaps only Hocking himself fully understood, is beautifully and inspirationally messy.

I am certainly glad I read this one, but I can’t recommend it entirely to others. I’ll keep thinking about it, I’m sure, but I’ll be as aware of the faults in its structure as I am in the deep wisdom – and love – that it circles around so messily.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Fascinating book marred by uneven narration

The book presents a fine overview of the history of philosophy in America. I am usually flexible when it comes to narrators, but Bloomberg made so many pronunciation errors my eyes got tired of wincing. Still recommended but with a warning.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing Book

I read this back in 2017. Now, I've listened to the professional reader, Josh Bloomberg. Mr. Bloomberg did mispronounce a few words. Nevertheless, it is a great reading. Seldom do I read/listen to a book twice. This book deserves three passes. I will read again someday. I would love to visit West Wind, see the old Hocking Library. Maybe.

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Disappointing on many levels...

As a once and current student of American Philosophy, I’m always interested in reviews of Transcendentalism to Pragmatism to Analytical to Postmodern schools of thought in the US... unfortunately this book has precious little to say about the drama of ideas and the social impact of those ideas of American Philosophy.

This book is focused on a forgettable and forgotten library of a forgettable and forgotten American Philosopher (and his wife) whose lives happened to intersect with more memorable notables of which make only passing appearances.

This book also reeks of epic snobbery and more Harvard mythologizing than one person can almost withstand. There is also a creepy undercurrent of necrophilia through an obsession of the long dead spouse of the forgotten American Philosopher that borders on disbelief, not too mention completely beside the point of a book that’s supposed to be about American Philosophy (or so I was suckered in by the title). But much in this book is beside the point.

If you’re looking for surveys or reviews or analysis of American Philosophy from the Transcendentalists to current (like Rorty, who is not mentioned at all!)... look elsewhere.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

History/memoir isn't enough of either

This is a book I generally liked, though I think it's a bit much. John Kaag writes a book about his exploration and inventory of the Hocking library while working on his thesis. He is depressed and in a marriage with which he's unhappy. The book becomes an odd melange of a history of American philosophy from Emerson forward and a personal memoir. It might have been more readable as more of one or another. Or, in my perfect world, much less memoir and much more perspective on philosophy. I like memoirs, but this one doesn't completely satisfy either way.

The Hocking library is a book collection gathered by William Ernest Hocking, an American philosopher who studied under Josiah Royce. By the time Kaag made his way to the abandoned house where the books were still stored in Hocking's home on family property the collection had been pilfered and left to mold and become mouse-eaten since Hocking's death in 1966. The book tells the story of Kaag's progression through the volumes finding, among other things, first editions by Kant, letters from Walt Whitman, books with Emerson marginalia, and hundreds of other wonderful finds. The Hocking family allows him to begin to catalog and attempt to preserve (and sell for the family's profit) the massive collection. (Reminder to any bibliophile: put your collection in your will or give it away before you die.)

Along the way Kaag discusses his unsatisfactory marriage, his feeling that he's, in essence, cheating on his wife with these books by intentionally excluding his wife in his trips to New Hampshire, and then cheating on his wife in reality with a philosopher friend who he eventually marries. As thin as his descriptions are it's pretty clear that he's his own worst enemy in most of this and it's an irritating distraction from the central theme of the book.

The bulk of this revelatory information could have been spent on a more coherent story on what involves some of the lesser known philosophers working in the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Philosophy gets dismissed, by no lesser lights than Stephen Hawking, as irrelevance in a world in which science has resolved the answers to most big questions. But Kaag picks up a line from William James' life: "Is life worth living?" and wrestles with it through the book. (Apparently it is with the right divorce/remarriage combo.) That's not a question science can answer, nor are many with which we deal daily. Philosophy is less about answers than how to think about things; it's about how to define terms and experiment with ideas. We lack these things in today's educational environment and undervalue them in our daily dialogues. Books that would focus on them with relevance have value. Perhaps it was a publishing decision to make this book more "personal" but it weakens the book nonetheless.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Not my cup of tea

The book was well read. It just what I like reading or listening to. Sorry

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

SEXUAL EQUALITY

John Kaag’s view of romantic love seems slightly askew when taken in the context of his two books, published two years apart.  “American Philosophy” is published in 2016 while “Hiking with Nietzsche” is published in 2018.  Having listened to both, one finds “Hiking with Nietzsche” belies the conclusion of romantic love characterized in “American Philosophy”.

In “American Philosophy, Kaag professes understanding the harm done to romantic love by male self-absorption and then ignores that realization in “Hiking with Nietzsche”. Kaag’s male self-absorption is flaunted in “Hiking with Nietzsche”.  Kaag seems quite dismissive of his second wife in his “Hiking…” adventure. Kaag seems mostly in love with himself and his pursuit of philosophy. 

Some argue Kaag’s book is a celebration of romantic love, but it is not.  Kaag’s story is about male societies’ inability to overcome the history of misogyny.  The implication is when women are treated as equal, society will change.  Reviewing Kaag’s two books suggests the world is not ready. 

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