ABSTRACT
This chapter traces West’s long engagement with pragmatism, beginning with the introduction to his influential 1982 book Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, which was reaffirmed more explicitly in 1997 essay, “Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience,” where he identified classical American pragmatism as a philosophical source to make sense of the African American experience. The essay then traces West’s numerous engagements with pragmatism over the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), which is without question West’s most sustained, profound, original, and now “standard account of the role of pragmatism in American thought,” to quote Richard Rorty.
