Community and Loyalty in American Philosophy

Steven A. Miller is a fellow with the Institute for American Thought at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as well as an adjunct scholar at Ripon College in Ripon, WI. His work has previously appeared in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Administration and Society, and the Journal of Social Philosophy.

• Introduction: ‘We’: The Dangerous Thing1. Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty2. The Sellarsian Ethical Framework3. Richard Rorty’s Quasi-Sellarsian We4. On the Prospects of Redescribing Rorty Roycely

"Steven Miller seeks to connect three American philosophers who the author tells us ‘appreciated the centrality of community to morality’: Josiah Royce, Wilfrid Sellars, and Richard Rorty . . . His book is really valuable. It makes us think along less traversed paths, forcing us to reevaluate our ways of thinking, with their heavy reliance on the small set of philosophers that we all too easily gravitate to. It's a book definitely worth reading." – Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"This well-written, scholarly work targets students of the history of recent American philosophy . . . Summing Up: Recommended." – CHOICE Reviews"‘We’—a word both inclusive and exclusive— is the very basis of the notion of community. It is a word that means that one never has to go it solely alone. But it’s also a warning to outsiders: you don’t belong with ‘us.’ Miller leads us carefully along the boundaries of the word and allows us to see both the promise and peril of community. Miller’s account of Royce, Sellars and Rorty is engaging and scrupulous, a succinct and convincing appeal to reconsider the ‘we’ in American intellectual history." – John Kaag, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA"Steven Miller’s excellent book methodically reconstructs and explores, with depth and clarity and feeling, one of the most important philosophical ideas in the American philosophical tradition, from its early formulation in Josiah Royce and C. S. Peirce, to its mid-twentieth century analytic articulation in Wilfrid Sellars, to its contemporary pragmatist vision in the wide-ranging writings of Richard Rorty: namely, that we understand ourselves best when we understand ourselves as loyal members of a unified community of ‘we-saying’ fellow suffers joined together in our many projects for the betterment of humanity." – Jerold Abrams, Creighton University, USA