NO MORE IVORY TOWER IMAGE: TEMPLE UNIVERSITY'S NEW PHILOSOPHY CHAIR WANTS TO CHANGE ITS REPUTATION
A new trend is taking place on college campuses across the nation to get more students interested in studying philosophy, traditionally considered a pillar of elitism.
Academicians across the country like Richard Shusterman, the new chair of Temple University's philosophy department, are trying to shed philosophy's stuffed-shirt image by focusing on more popular interests, such as people's obsessions with their body weight, fashion and food.
"We philosophers must not just speculate from the ivory tower. A philosopher should get involved," says Shusterman, an expert on body culture and hip-hop music, as well as the more standard topics in aesthetics and literature.
Trying to make philosophy more attractive to Generation-Xers, non-traditional students and the community, Shusterman has designed a non-credit certificate course in body culture that is offered at Temple's Center City campus this spring.
"It is a thoughtful and entertaining approach to how we think about our bodies, what we do to alter their appearance, why we put particular foods and drinks into them, and how we shape our identities based on them," explains Shusterman.
"Body practices form a central part of the art of living, and guidance in the art of living has been, since the time of Socrates, an important function of philosophy. While people may read less philosophy today, we devote a great deal of attention to the aesthetics of our body," says Shusterman, who investigates body practices-- from yoga, dieting, and bioenergetics to bodybuilding and branding-- to understand how they are used to create lifestyles.
Shusterman also hosts a monthly philosophy discussion series, and directs an annual lecture series at Temple. Currently, he's organizing a conference in April on philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, a Philadelphia native who was the first African-American Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement.
Shusterman is the author of many books, including The Object of Literary Criticism, T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, Analytic Aesthetics, Practicing Philosophy, and Pragmatist Aesthetics (the latter has been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, Japanese and Korean).
The Philadelphia native earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University.
While in Israel, he served as an officer in Israel's military intelligence for three years and was involved in the operations related to the commando raid at Uganda's Entebbe Airport in 1976.
Before coming to Temple in 1986, he was tenured in Israel and a Visiting Fellow at St. John's College of Oxford University. While at Temple, Shusterman has been awarded a Senior National Endowment of Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and served as a Fulbright professor in Berlin. He has also been named by UNESCO to direct an international project on urbanism and popular culture.
Every June, he teaches philosophy in French at the College International de Philosophie in Paris.
Shusterman shuttles between his home in Philadelphia's Art Museum section and his apartment in Manhattan.
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bf-548 January 26, 1999
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