SOURCE: “Evading Narrative Myth, Evading Prophetic Pragmatism: Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy,” in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, Winter, 1991-92, pp. 517-42.

In the following essay, Gooding-Williams examines West's concept of “prophetic pragmatism,” its associations with the pragmatist tradition, West's reading of W. E. B. DuBois, and the problematic significance of West's “universal moral discourse.”

Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism is a rhetorically compelling history of American pragmatism that reconstructs, promotes, and purports to extend what West characterizes as pragmatism’s “evasion of philosophy.” Taking his cue from Richard Rorty’s interpretation of modern (post-Cartesian) European philosophy as a fruitless quest after secure epistemic foundations, West discovers in the American pragmatist tradition a sustained and persistently provocative refusal of that quest, a repudiation of epistemological preoccupations that subordinates knowledge to power and treats “thought as a weapon to enable...