Cornel West Quotes on Knowledge
Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), Race Matters (1993), and Democracy Matters (2004) give contemporary American philosophy one of its most distinctive engagements with the pragmatist, prophetic-Christian, and Black radical traditions. The central project of the early genealogy is the recovery of American pragmatism — through Emerson, James, Dewey, and Du Bois — as a distinctively democratic philosophical tradition whose engagement with the actual political life of the country the standard analytic-philosophy curriculum has systematically obscured. The framework, integrating the prophetic Black Christian tradition West inherits from the African American church with the pragmatist and Marxist resources he draws from the academy, shaped the contemporary public-philosophy and Black radical traditions through West’s many students and the wider engagement with race, religion, and democratic politics.
Quotes
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“In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.”
The Role of Law in Progressive Politics" in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993) -
“The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.”
The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64 -
“To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak. That is, it creates a vision of the world that puts into the limelight the social misery that is usually hidden or concealed by the dominant viewpoints of a society . "Intellectual" in that sense simply means those who are willing to reflect critically upon themselves as well as upon the larger society and to ascer”
Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader . Basic Books . 2000. p. 551. ISBN 978-0-465-09110-2 . -
“The authority of science … promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.… Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality…. In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.”
Prophesy Deliverance! (2002) -
“To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom , love justice , and love freedom . (p172)”
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism(2004) -
“Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284”
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