October 19, 2007

The Fuller Brushoff — Margaret Fuller as Transcendentalist

By CARLIN ROMANO

In Pragmatism and Feminism (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Purdue philosophy professor Charlene Haddock Seigfried demonstrated the price to pragmatism of a canon that long excluded women thinkers such as Jane Addams. To be seminal, Seigfried argued, you needn't be an inseminator. In one passage, she made her point by a brief comparison to another key American intellectual movement.

Referring to Morton White's Documents in the History of American Philosophy: From Jonathan Edwards