This site is home to information and applications for the upcoming Summer Seminar on Ralph Waldo Emerson being hosted by Dr. Russell Goodman at the Philosophy Department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Seminar was held

June 6 - July 2, 2005

Brief Overview of Recent Seminar

Each of the seminar's four weeks was organized around a theme:
1) the unity of Emerson's Essays, First Series
2) Emerson's idealisms
3) Emerson's moral philosophy
4) Emerson on the self

The seminar's distinguished visitors included Stanley Cavell (Harvard), Sharon Cameron (Johns Hopkins) and Barbara Packer (UCLA).

For information: e-mail emerson@unm.edu; call (505) 277-4024; or write
Professor Russell B. Goodman, Department of Philosophy,
MSC 03 2140, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131

If "each age must write its own books," as Emerson said in "The American Scholar," this age has certainly produced its own extraordinary books and essays about Emerson. Such writers as Stanley Cavell, Barbara Packer, Richard Poirier, Sharon Cameron and others have given us a new Emerson: a theorist of democracy with a tragic sense; an inheritor of Kant with affinities to Nietzsche and Heidegger; a "pragmatist" whose work influenced the writings of William James, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Several of these writers-Packer, West, Cavell-spoke at the Emerson Institute that I directed in 2003 ("Ralph Waldo Emerson at 200: Literature, Philosophy, Democracy"). During the course of the institute many of us felt the need for more detailed study of Emerson's essays, and we held a special discussion session on "Intellect" that proved to be one of the most successful of the institute. That session was the model for this seminar, which focused on particular Emersonian texts. We were fortunate to have Cavell (Philosophy, Harvard) and Packer (English, UCLA) as visitors again, and in the seminar's last week, Sharon Cameron (English, Johns Hopkins).

The unifying question of the seminar concerned the coherence or consistency of Emerson's views, a question famously raised by Emerson himself when he wrote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines." We spent the first week looking at the way Emerson's consistencies-as well as his commitments to "whim" or "spontaneity"-play out in a single work with twelve parts, his Essays, First Series. In the second week we considered Emerson's various idealisms, as expressed in the "Idealism" chapter of Nature (1836), the great, troubled essay "Experience" from the Essays, Second Series (1844), and "Illusions," from the late book, The Conduct of Life (1860). In the third week, we studied Emerson's moral philosophy, with emphasis on his "moral perfectionism" and his development of an ethic of virtues, and in the seminar's fourth week we considered Emerson's complicated portrayal of the self in the "Divinity School Address," "Circles," "Montaigne," and "Fate."

The seminar was collaborative, and took some of its specific directions from the participants, who were drawn from departments of philosophy, literature, American studies, politics, history, and religious studies.

Recap of 2005 Institute

Recap of 2003 Institute