Contacts: Russell Goodman, (505) 277-4024 Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821

November 21, 2002 UNM PHILOSOPHY CHAIR RECEIVES GRANT TO HOST INSTITUTE ON EMERSON University of New Mexico Philosophy chair Russell Goodman has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a summer institute in 2003 for college professors and university teachers on “Ralph Waldo Emerson at 200: Literature, Philosophy, Democracy.” Over the past 25 years, many new insights and writings about Emerson have surfaced. Philosophers such as Stanley Cavell, literary critics like Barbara Packer and political theorists such as Cornel West have all written about Emerson. “Although Emerson’s works never went out of fashion, there’s been a tremendous renewal of interest in Emerson over the last 30 years,” said Goodman. “In English and Philosophy departments and in politics, people have been thinking about why his individualism is necessary in some way for democracy. In a lot of ways, he is the definitive American thinker.” New writings about Emerson include Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Thinking of Emerson, and Being Odd, Getting Even; Packer’s Emerson’s Fall, and The Trancendentalists (in The Cambridge History of American Literature vol. 2) and West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. The five-week institute, which will be held at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, coincides with the bicentennial of Emerson’s birth on May 25, 1803. Participants will be studying particular essays by Emerson, such as Self-Reliance and The Divinity School Address, and will consider Emerson’s influence on the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In the third week Barbara Packer of UCLA will present four lectures on Northern Intellectuals and the Mexican War. She will consider Emerson’s opposition to the war and to the slavery which made it possible in the new territories, and the misgivings of soldiers like Ulysses S. Grant. The fourth week moves into political philosophy, led by Thomas Dumm, professor of Political Science at Amherst College and Cornel West, professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton. The institute wraps up with a fifth week on Cavell and Emersonian Perfectionism. “Stanley Cavell’s work constitutes the most significant engagement with the transcendentalists ever conducted by a professional philosopher.” says Goodman. “The attraction for an institute such as this is the chance to be in the same room with a Cavell or West talking about Emerson,” said Goodman. For more information visit the website at www.unm.edu/~emerson or contact the Philosophy Department at (505) 277-4024. # # #

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