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Response To Comments On 'Addams On Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, And African Americans', Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The author thanks Denise James and Charlene Haddock Seigfried for their thoughtful comments on her paper. Although they respond in different ways, they both picked up on questions and uncertainties that arose as she wrote the paper.

For some years, she has been trying to write about essays Addams addressed to African American audiences. For this paper, she decided to deal only with Addams’s writings between 1900 and 1910 in order to compare her essays for African American audiences with what she wrote at the same time for wider audiences. This approach enabled her to sort out when Addams’s writing …

Addams On Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, And African Americans, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this paper, I will restrict the discussion to Addams’s writings during the twentieth century’s first decade, when she developed most of her thinking on cultural pluralism. By 1910, Dewey had not yet moved to cultural pluralism, Boas’s cultural relativism had not yet penetrated the intellectual world, and Mendelian genetics had not yet replaced Lamarckian assumptions regarding heredity.The Great War was yet to shatter illusions about Western civilization’s strength and rightness.

Reading Dewey’S Political Philosophy Through Addams’S Political Compromises, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Both John Dewey and Jane Addams believed that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. While their vision of democracy is rightly called radical, the processes through which they proposed to cure the ills of democracy are in large measure conservative, in the classical, Burkean sense of the term. To show this, I first explain how well their political philosophies line up, particularly their proposals for political reconstruction. I then use Addams’s experiences as a delegate to the 1912 Progressive Party Convention as a test case in real time for Dewey’s proposals for political reconstruction. The compromises …

Locating Royce's Reasoning On Race, Marilyn Fischer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the fall 2009 issue of The Pluralist, Tommy Curry and Dwayne Tunstall challenged the current, dominant view of Royce as an antiracist. In "Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal," Curry presents Royce as a white supremacist, an admirer of British colonialism, and an advocate of black assimilation to Anglo-Saxon cultural practices (14-15). Tunstall, in "Josiah Royce's 'Enlightened' Antiblack Racism?," presents Royce as a non-essentialist regarding race, yet as a cultural antiblack racist, with a colonial attitude comparable to that held by John Stuart Mill (Tunstall 40). In the same issue of The Pluralist, Jacquelyn Kegley analyzes Royce's …