Summer 2012

A Nation of Thinkers

by Troy Jollimore

AMERICA THE PHILOSOPHICAL.
By Carlin Romano.
Knopf. 672 pp. $35

Carlin Romano begins his new book with a provocative thesis: The United States is the most philosophical nation on earth. Romano, a critic at large for The Chronicle of Higher Education and professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College, declares his stance in the first few pages of America the Philosophical: “The surprising little secret of our ardently capitalist, famously materialist, heavily iPodded, iPadded, and iPhoned society is that America in the early 21st century towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, 19th-century Germany, or any other place one can name over the past three millennia.”

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Troy Jollimore is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. He is the author of Love’s Vision (2011) and the forthcoming book On Loyalty, as well as two volumes of poetry.
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