An American angle of vision -- Poem : roots/edges -- Threadbare crape : reflections on the American strand -- An American angle of vision, part 1 -- An American angle of vision, part 2 -- Spires of influence : the importance of Emerson for classical American philosophy -- Josiah Royce's philosophy of the community : danger of the detached individual -- Possibility or else! : the philosophy of William James -- Environing -- Poem : professional tin cup -- A relational world : the significance of the thought of William James and John Dewey for global culture -- Nature nostalgia and the city : an American dilemma -- Space, time, and touch : philosophical dimensions of urban consciousness -- Glass without feet : dimensions of urban aesthetics -- Turning -- Poem : waiting -- Why bother : is life worth living? : experience as pedagogical -- Ill-at-ease : the natural travail of ontological disconnectedness -- "Turning" backward : the erosion of moral sensibility -- The inevitability of our own death : the celebration of time as a prelude to disaster -- Isolation as starvation : John Dewey and a philosophy of the handicapped -- Bequeathing -- Poem : deadlines -- Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd? -- The cultural immortality of philosophy as human drama -- To be human is to humanize : a radically empirical aesthetic -- Experience grows by its edges : a phenomenology of relations in an American philosophical vein -- The aesthetic drama of the ordinary -- Teaching -- Poem : lurking -- The gamble for excellence : John Dewey's pedagogy of experience -- Liberty and order in the educational anthropology of Maria Montessori -- The erosion of face-to-face pedagogy : a jeremiad -- Cultural literacy : a time for a new curriculum -- Trumping cynicism with imagination.