Background
Crispin Sartwell was born on June 20, 1958, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. He is a son of Franklin Sartwell, a writer, and Joyce Sartwell, a teacher and performance artist.
University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland, United States
From 1976 to 1980 Crispin Sartwell attended the University of Maryland at College Park and graduated with Bachelor of Arts degree.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
In 1985 Crispin Sartwell received a Master of Arts degree from the Johns Hopkins University.
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
In 1989 Crispin Sartwell obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Virginia.
(This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to comm...)
This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to common American and European experience and discussed in relation to Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and African traditions. The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions is the first truly multi-cultural philosophy of art. It develops a new theory of what art is, and discusses it in relation to Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, as well as Native American, African, and African-American traditions.
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Living-Aesthetics-Spiritual-Traditions/dp/0791423603/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(This book examines the consequences of utter affirmations...)
This book examines the consequences of utter affirmations of our world as it is, exploring the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment. Sartwell presents an extreme and provocative philosophy of life. He explores what happens if we love this world precisely as it is, with all of its pain, with all of its evil, with all of its bizarre and arbitrary and monstrous thereness. In a highly personal and brutally direct style, Sartwell explores the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment. The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of reality The author engages contemporary and historical debates in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement toward death, a rejection of reality Moral and political values - the ethical rejection of the particular precisely from within the particular - are, Sartwell claims, an assault on human authenticity. Thus, transgression – which is described as the affirmation of embodiment through obscenity – is something we radically require.
https://www.amazon.com/Obscenity-Anarchy-Reality-Crispin-Sartwell/dp/0791429083/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora N...)
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X—their words speak firmly, eloquently, personally of the impact of white America on the lives of African-Americans. Black autobiographical discourses, from the earliest slave narratives to the most contemporary urban raps, have each in their own way gauged and confronted the character of white society. For Crispin Sartwell, as philosopher, cultural critic, and white male, these texts, through their exacting insights and external perspective, provide a rare opportunity, a means of glimpsing and gaining access to contents and core of white identity.
https://www.amazon.com/Act-Like-Know-African-American-Autobiography/dp/0226735273/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(In End of Story, Crispin Sartwell maintains that the acad...)
In End of Story, Crispin Sartwell maintains that the academy is obsessed with language, and with narrative in particular. Narrative has been held to constitute or explain time, action, value, history, and human identity. Sartwell argues that this obsession with language and narrative has become a sort of disease. Pitting such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Bataille, and Epictetus against the narrativism of MacIntyre, Ricoeur, and Aristotle, Sartwell celebrates the ways narratives and selves disintegrate and recommends a lapse into ecstatic or mundane incoherence. As the book rollicks through Wodehouse, Thoreau, the Book of Job, still-life painting, and Sartwell’s autobiography, there emerges a hopeful if bizarre new sense of who we are and what we can be.
https://www.amazon.com/End-Story-Annihilation-Language-History/dp/079144726X/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(Extreme Virtue presents a new and radical approach to the...)
Extreme Virtue presents a new and radical approach to the problems of leadership and virtue in public life. Originating in the author’s newspaper writing about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the book grapples with what has gone wrong in the American political system and describes what we should look for in our leaders. Sartwell argues that the real problem is a pervasive lack of truth in political leaders and that more can be accomplished by straight talk than by polling and focus groups.
https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Virtue-Truth-Leadership-American/dp/0791458806/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also i...)
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also in the language we use and everywhere in the world around us. In this elegant, witty, and ultimately profound meditation on what is beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six different cultures - ancient Greek's 'to kalon', the Japanese idea of 'wabi-sabi', Hebrew's 'yapha', the Navajo concept 'hozho', Sanskrit 'sundara', and our own English-language 'beauty'. Each word becomes a door onto another way of thinking about, and looking at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. In Sartwell's hands these six names of beauty - and there could be thousands more - are revealed as simple and profound ideas about our world and our selves.
https://www.amazon.com/Six-Names-Beauty-Crispin-Sartwell/dp/0415979927/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(Emma Goldman called Voltairine de Cleyre "the most gifted...)
Emma Goldman called Voltairine de Cleyre "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced." Yet her writings and speeches on anarchism and feminism – as radical, passionate, and popular at the time as Goldman’s – are virtually unknown today. This important book brings de Cleyre’s eloquent and incisive work out of undeserved obscurity. Twenty-one essays are reprinted here, including her classic works: "Anarchism and the American Tradition," "The Dominant Idea," and "Sex Slavery." Three biographical essays are also included: two new ones by Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, and a rarely reprinted one from Emma Goldman.
https://www.amazon.com/Exquisite-Rebel-Voltairine-Anarchist-Feminist-ebook/dp/B00QJ87EWE/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(In Against the State, Crispin Sartwell unleashes a quick ...)
In Against the State, Crispin Sartwell unleashes a quick and brutal rejection of the traditional arguments for state legitimacy. Sartwell considers the classics of Western political philosophy - Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Hume, Bentham, Rawls, and Habermas, among others - and argues that their positions are not only wrong but also embarrassingly bad. He separates the traditional pro-state arguments into three classes: social contract theories, utilitarian justifications, and justicial views, all while attacking both general strategies and particular formulations. Sartwell argues that the state rests on nothing but deadly force and its accompanying coercion, and that no one is under any obligation to obey the law merely because it is the law. He concludes by articulating a positive vision of an anarchist future, based on the “individualism” of such figures as Emerson and Thoreau. Against the State provides a rigorous and provocative foil to the classic texts, and also serves as a concise statement of the anarchist challenge.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-State-Introduction-Anarchist-Political-ebook/dp/B003HC8DLQ/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art ...)
Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and action. Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the disciplines of political science and political philosophy, philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic notions of aesthetics – beauty, sublimity, and representation – and applying them in a political context. A general argument about the fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture.
https://www.amazon.com/Political-Aesthetics-Crispin-Sartwell/dp/0801448905/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(The Practical Anarchist brings to light the work of Josia...)
The Practical Anarchist brings to light the work of Josiah Warren, eccentric American genius. Devoting his life to showing the practicality of an astonishing ideal, Warren devoted equal industry to the question of how to make a pair of shoes and how to remake the social world into an individualist paradise. This volume presents, out of the welter of bewildering writings left by Warren, a reading text designed for today’ readers and students. It seeks to convey the practical value of many of Warren’s ideas, their continuing relevance.
https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Anarchist-Writings-American-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B07K4V9V5R/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(Philosopher, music critic, and syndicated columnist Crisp...)
Philosopher, music critic, and syndicated columnist Crispin Sartwell has forged a distinctive and fiercely original identity over the years as a cultural commentator. In books about anarchism, art and politics, Native American and African American thought and culture, Eastern spirituality, and American transcendentalism, Sartwell has relentlessly insisted on an ethos rooted in unadorned honesty with oneself and a healthy skepticism of others. This volume of selected popular writings combines music and art criticism with personal memoir about addiction and rebellion, as well as cultural commentary on race, sexuality, cynicism, and the meaning of life.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Escape-Cynicism-Excelsior-Editions-ebook/dp/B00MOMWVAO/?tag=2022091-20
2014
educator journalist philosopher author
Crispin Sartwell was born on June 20, 1958, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. He is a son of Franklin Sartwell, a writer, and Joyce Sartwell, a teacher and performance artist.
From 1976 to 1980 Crispin Sartwell attended the University of Maryland at College Park and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1985 he received a Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University. In 1989 Sartwell obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Virginia.
From 1989 to 1993 Crispin Sartelli was an assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. From 1993 to 1997 he was an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. From 1995 to 1996, Sartwell was an Annenberg Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. In 1997 he was appointed an associate professor of humanities at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg.
Crispin Sartwell is an associate professor at the Dickinson College. 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.
(Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art ...)
2010(This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to comm...)
1995(This book examines the consequences of utter affirmations...)
1996(Philosopher, music critic, and syndicated columnist Crisp...)
2014(In Against the State, Crispin Sartwell unleashes a quick ...)
2008(In End of Story, Crispin Sartwell maintains that the acad...)
2000(Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also i...)
2004(Emma Goldman called Voltairine de Cleyre "the most gifted...)
2005(Extreme Virtue presents a new and radical approach to the...)
2003(The Practical Anarchist brings to light the work of Josia...)
2011(Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora N...)
1998As a political philosopher, Crispin Sartwell has been an articulate advocate of Anarchism and individual rights as opposed to the rights of the State.
Crispin Sartwell is a member of the International Communication Association and the American Philosophical Association.
On June 19, 1999, Crispin Sartwell married Marion Winik. They have five children: Emma, Hayes Winik, Vincent Winik, Samuel, Jane Winik.