- Lived:
- Born 1953, Tulsa, Oklahoma · raised in Sacramento · teaches in New York
- Tradition:
- American pragmatism fused with the Black prophetic tradition; philosophy as public witness
- The Big Idea:
- Philosophy is not a spectator sport — it is cultural criticism in the service of democracy, done out loud, with courage, love, and a blues-singer's honesty about how bad things really are.
- In their words:
- He calls himself "a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas."
- If you remember one thing:
- West took Socrates' examined life out of the seminar room and lived it in public — in lecture halls, on street corners, at protests, even on a presidential ballot — insisting that the real test of a philosophy is what it does for the people catching hell.