Great Jazz
Contents © 2003
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. This book is available at Amazon.Com
According to Jane Addams, morality must be seen as a social rather than an individual endeavor, and democracy as a way of life rather than merely a basis for laws. While arguing that we are morally obliged to seek out diverse experiences, she exposes the biases of unequally positioned subjects. She reflects on the factors that hinder the ability of all members of society to determine their own well-being and astutely analyses class, ethnic, and gender biases in family structures and women’s roles, labor and industry disputes, and urges the need for radical reforms in education and politics.
Jane Addams, The Long Road of Women's Memory. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. This book is available at Amazon.Com
As Addams recounts conversations in which women revealed how they lived in the midst of poverty, war, and physical and psychological abuse, she reflects on the ways that memory and myth sustain them. In its transformative possibilities, the utilization of memory looks to the future rather than simply repeating what has already happened. Each chapter emphasizes this creative appropriation of the past, including transmuting the past, reacting on life, disturbing conventions, integrating industry, challenging war, and interpretive memory.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey. Ed., Re-Reading the Canon series, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. This book is available at Amazon.Com
At a time when feminists are questioning and developing alternatives to the model of scientistic value-free inquiry, the myth of detached observation informing the epistemological turn, rationalistic ethics, and the model of an unattached, nonrelational subject, this book reminds us of Dewey's early and passionate opposition to the same assumptions and his reconstruction of philosophy as a "method of moral and political diagnoses and prognosis."
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. This book is available at Amazon.Com
"In 1996, pragmatist feminism fully secured a place on the philosophical map with the publication of the first book in the field, Charlene Haddock Seigfried's Pragmatism and Feminism. Addressing both pragmatists and feminists, Pragmatism and Feminism reclaims as pragmatist feminists women philosophers such as Elsie Ripley Clapp, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Ella Flagg Young, and the better-known Addams and Gilman, and explores some of the benefits and tensions produced by bringing contemporary feminist theory together with American philosophy, particularly on the topics of science, experience, and ethics." Shannon Sullivan, Journal of Speculative Philosophy.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. This book is available at Amazon.Com
"For me, the book provided new insights into the implications of specific texts and also into the continuity, from one period and one topic to another, of James's preoccupations and methodological strategies. Reading it, I felt it I was 'getting inside' James's writings in a way I never had before. She teases out dominant motifs and shows their implications for his own position in ways he was incapable of doing. Without claiming to have the last word (which would be unJamesian), she is very persuasive." Beth J. Singer
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Chaos and Context: A Study in William James. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1978. This book is available at Amazon.Com
"James' most important philosophical contention has to do with the status of relations and the philosophical implications of that contention, which he subsequently referred to as radical empiricism. Professor Seigfried's book is the only full-length analysis of this doctrine, and it is exquisitely and originally presented. The title of her book, Chaos and Context, points to an original interpretation of 'pure experience' and her explanatory chapter is one of the best on the subject." -blurb