Book Review The Hope for a Better Community: The Luring Image of Philosophical Community

Abstract

<p content-type="flush left">Kramer’s Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume 1: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community begins with a longing, a deep yearning that many professional philosophers have: to be more, and to be more with others. The isolation of professionalized philosophy leaves many of us with the taste of bitter herbs; there must be more to this life that we lauded for so long, that many of us sacrificed so much to achieve. The current mode of the profession is as an isolated endeavor, and we feel the void that it leaves. As Kramer writes, “These [professional] philosophers find their word mostly anemic in effecting broader culture and they resign themselves to their fates as isolated scholars. They hope that their research at least hones their own thinking, secures a stable position, and advances scholarship in their respective fields. . . .”1 The movie character Abe Lucas, played by Joaquin Phoenix in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, is a caricature of this philosophical creature. He bitterly states, “I wanted to be an active world changer and I’ve wound up a passive intellectual who can’t f*ck.”2