Culture October 6, 2016

“I ate my breakfast—the same banana and toast I’d eaten for a decade,” John Kaag writes in American Philosophy: A Love Story, “and wondered how philosophy had managed to lose its personal character.” In search of an answer, Kaag retreats to the library of William Ernest Hocking, a nearly forgotten American pragmatist who left behind a mind-boggling treasure trove of books after his death. The once grand, now rotting, library at his estate in the woods of New Hampshire held first editions of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Locke, and Jane Addams; author-annotated copies of pragmatist classics by William James, C.S. Peirce,