Description
Book SynopsisAs a Jamaican immigrant arriving in the United States at the age of twenty, Jason Hill noticed how often Americans identified themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. He observed, for example, the reluctance of West Indians to joins ''black causes'' for fear of losing their identity. He began to ask himself what sort of world he wanted to live in, a quest that in time led him to the idea of the cosmopolitan. In Becoming a Cosmopolitan, Jason D. Hill argues that we need a new understanding of the self. He revives the idea of the cosmopolitan, the person who identifies the world as home. Arguing for the right to forget where we came from, Hill proposes a new moral cosmopolitanism for the new millennium.
Trade ReviewThe fire of individual freedom that burns for Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Dewey, and Sartre now sheds light in Jason Hill's Becoming a Cosmopolitan. Hill develops pragmatic, existentialist, and narrative accounts of how we can choose and make ourselves, despite prefabricated racial, ethnic and national identities. -- Naomi Zack, Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Albany
Impressive study. . . . Becoming a Cosmopolitan is a scholarly treatise on the development of human personality, written from the perspective of a philosopher who has made a thorough analysis of the subject. As an erudite and articulate advocate of the cosmopolitan life, he takes us on an intellectual journey through the realm of philosophy, examining the writings of philosophers ancient and modern on such profound and fundamental issues as the development of self and the process of becoming something better and nobler. * Jamaica Gleaner, July 16, 2000 *
This is a richly insightful book whose essay-like philosophical argument is embedded in the barest sketch of a potent biography—one that describes the author's emigration from Jamaica to the United States. The argument is provocative. * Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy *
An ontological rebel rejecting the categories that limit our freedom, embracing a morality of becoming, arguing for the merit of forgetting, Hill offers us a new moral imagination. -- Leonard Harris, Purdue University
Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Creating the Self: The Self in Moral Becoming Chapter 2: The Existentialist Self: Radically Free and Rebellious Chapter 3: Moral Becoming, Moral Masking, and the Narrativity of the Self: Negotiating the Cosmopolitan Terrain Chapter 4: Forgetting Where We Came From: The Moral Imperative of Every Cosmopolitan Chapter 5: Radical and Moderate Moral Cosmopolitanism Chapter 6: Liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Communitarianism: Friends or Adversaries Epilogue: Coming Out as a Moral Cosmopolitan Appendix: Historical Pictures of Cosmopolitanism Biblioraphy Index About the Author
