Crispin Sartwell


Crispin Gallagher Sartwell is an American philosopher, self-professed anarchist and journalist. and is a faculty member of the philosophy department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Background

Born in Washington, D.C., Sartwell is the son of Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, a reporter, editor, and photographer. His grandfather, also Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Washington Times-Herald. His great-grandfather, Herman Bernstein broke the story of a secret correspondence between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas during World War I in The New York Times. Sartwell worked as a freelance rock critic for publications, including Record and Melody Maker.
His mother, Joyce Abell, and stepfather, Richard Abell, were teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland and organic vegetable farmers in Rappahannock County, Virginia.
Sartwell received a B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, a M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia—where his dissertation supervisor was Richard Rorty. He has taught philosophy, communication and political science at a number of schools, including Vanderbilt University, The University of Alabama, Penn State, Millersville, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Dickinson College.

Career

A journalist since he was 20, Sartwell's syndicated column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appeared in numerous newspapers through the 1990s and 2000s, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times. He has continued to write for the popular press, with work appearing in the New York Times as a contributing writer to the Times's philosophy section, The Stone. He has been published in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Washington Post, All Things Considered and other venues. He has appeared on C-Span's Washington Journal, discussing political philosophy and ethics. Sartwell remains actively involved in music criticism, including writing a country music column for the NY Press.
After receiving his BA from the University of Maryland in 1980, Sartwell received his MA in Philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University in 1985. He pursued his doctorate at the University of Virginia, supervised by Richard Rorty, writing his dissertation on Art and Articulation, discussing pictorial representation in Dewey, Heidegger, Goodman and Gadamer.
From 1989 through 1993, Sartwell was an Andrew W, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University. From 1995 to 1996, Sartwell was an Annenberg Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
Sartwell is best known as a political philosopher, with significant interests in Analytic Philosophy, Aesthetics and Theory of Knowledge. As a political philosopher, he has been an articulate advocate of Anarchism and individual rights as opposed to the rights of the State. In his 2008 work, Against the State: an Introduction to Anarchist Political Philosophy, he refuted the traditional justifications for the state from Hobbes through Nozick. This was followed by his 2010 work, Political Aesthetics, where he evaluated various systems based on the assumption that political systems are in part aesthetic systems.
Sartwell's interest in language as a system and its constraints and problems has been a constant in his career. Perhaps his clearest expression of this was in his 2000 publication, End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History, which posited an academic obsession with language qua language and narrative at the expense of a better conceptual and open dialogue.
As a Philosopher of Aesthetics as of language, Sartwell has seen the issues of beauty as being a constant in the search for meaning. His most recent work How to Escape: Magic, Madness, Beauty and Cynicism, published in 2014, looked at a wide variety of artistic expression and experience from an aesthetics perspective. This followed his previous work, 2004's Six Names of Beauty, where he used different words for beauty in a variety of languages including Greek, Sanskrit, Japanese and Navajo as a gateway to understanding the cultural diversity and similarities between ideas and manifestations of beauty.
Sartwell acquired a reputation as an epistemologist whose basic ideas on knowledge involve "three central claims: knowledge is the ultimate goal--the telos--of inquiry; knowledge is true belief; and justification is merely a means for arriving at true belief". Particularly the claim that knowledge equates to true belief has garnered some attention.
On March 3, 2016, Sartwell was placed on leave from his faculty position at Dickinson College in response to posts on his blog in which he accused other philosophy professors of plagiarism. According to Sartwell, the action is related to a video, embedded in the blog post, of Miranda Lambert singing "Time to Get a Gun." In September, 2016, the college's student newspaper reported that Sartwell had returned to his position and would resume teaching in the spring of 2017.

Works

In addition to his major publications, Sartwell has published over 40 professional articles in a variety of academic journals including the British Journal of Aesthetics, Philosophy Today, American Philosophical Quarterly and others.

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