Book on Philosophy Says Americans are Smarter than We Think

The cover review of the New York Times Book section featured a journalist/philosopher writing on a new book by another journalist/philosopher. I'm biased here because the author of America the Philosophicalis Carlin Romano, who wrote for many years for the Inquirer and whose features are much missed. The reviewer is Anthony Gottlieb who was my editor when I was an intern at the Economist, and who is also a friend. His book, The Dream of Reason, is one I'm constantly consulting. That's how it ended up in the picture above.

Both authors have backgrounds in philosophy but are journalists at heart. Both see philosophy as something that the general public can understand without any so-called dumbing down.
There are some places where the reviewer and the author disagreed, but both seem to share a faith in the American intellect. And so they agreed that reports of our intellectual demise have been greatly exaggerated:

 "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free," "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future" and "The Age of American Unreason" are just three of the books from American writers in the past five years that belabor religious fundamentalism, conservative talk shows, scientific illiteracy or the many available flavors of junk food for thought. The fallacy of such books, as Romano argues, is that they take some rotten parts for the largely nutritious whole. It's not so much that they compare American apples with foreign oranges, but that they fail to acknowledge that the United States is an enormous fruit bowl. Everything is to be found in it, usually in abundance, including a vibrant intellectual life. Rather like that of India — which has over a third of the planet's illiterate adults but also one of the largest university systems in the world — the intellectual stature of America eludes simple generalizations.

That's not to say we should applaud the fact that, as in India, huge swaths of the public miss out on a decent education and the opportunity to take part in the country's intellectual life. But the authors do agree that there is an intellectual life here to miss out on. Read the whole review here.