Contemporary philosophy comes in so many categories and types that even listing them can be dizzying. Race, gender, cultural, environmental, historical, discipline, even style and humor are in the mix. Diversity and specialization ever lead, fueled by the tensions we explicate and the passions that compel us. Is this a halcyon period? A darker sign of fragmentation whose consequences we have only begun to chart? Some part of both or cloth of another suit we have yet to wear? Time will tell.
Now turn back the epochal clock to just about a century ago. It’s 1919; a savage First World War has just ended with some 40 million or more dead. We know the story well enough. A short-sighted peace gains the victors their spoils, punishes the losers, redraws several continental maps while reinforcing colonialism and sets the stage for a bloodier conflict to come about two decades later. The...