Alain Beauclair

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of the concept of intimacy, arguing that it concerns moments of mutual imaginings generative of desire. As a peculiar mode of shared conduct, it is difficult to categorize the value of such actions insofar as they fall outside our ordinary conception of the public and private spheres. Nonetheless, when achieved, intimacy is not only an expansion of the private and a realization of a good-in-itself, but also has a bearing on our orientation to the broader world.

The noblest man living in a desert absorbs something of its harshness and sterility, while the nostalgia of the mountain-bred man when cut off from his surroundings is proof how deeply environment has become part of his being. Neither the savage nor the civilized man is what he is by native constitution but by the culture in which he participates.People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.A prominent undercurrent in the tradition of American philosophy concerns the endeavor to recover hope through a return to the ordinary and everyday. Ralph Waldo Emerson envisions and inaugurates such a path for the American scholar: I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the...

American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present by Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt is an introduction to the history of American Philosophy from the period of 1894 to the present, grounded in an outlook informed by classical pragmatism. Spanning thirty-two chapters and covering dozens of figures, the text is as comprehensive a survey of American Philosophy as I have ever come across. While the book includes a list of the usual suspects with chapters devoted to figures like Emerson, James, and Dewey, the book is also a veritable Who's Who of who is missing from the American canon. For those working in the American tradition with a predilection toward pluralism, this characteristic is particularly noteworthy. The...