The Many Altars of Modernity

Chapter 1: The Pluralist Phenomenon

The term “pluralism” has a long history in philosophy, where it has basically meant that there are several ways of looking at reality. In recent philosophical discourse the term has been applied to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games.” Interesting though this may be, this philosophical usage is not what I am concerned with here. Rather I mean by pluralism a phenomenon, not in the mind of a philosophical thinker, but an empirical fact in society experienced by ordinary people (of whom, happily, there are many more than philosophers). This more mundane meaning of the term was pioneered by Horace Kallen (1882 – 1974), a Harvard-trained philosopher who taught for many years at the New School for ...