Brooklyn Existentialism: Voices from the Stoop Explaining How Philosophical Realism Can Bring About the Restoration of Character, Intelligence and Taste

Immortalized by some of the greatest Hollywood films of the 20th Century, Italian Brooklyn became one of the icons of American culture. Brooklyn Existentialism shows that the culture of that time and place was more than just an icon. The oxymoronic combination of uprootedness and ethnic solidarity that were found in Brooklyn during the middle years of the 20th century provide an opening that takes the reader not just back to Italy, not just back to Europe, but back to the sources of philosophical realism that made Europe, Italy, and America possible in the first place. Brooklyn Existentialism is ethnophilosophy with a vengeance. It is a take-no-prisoners attack on the bad ideas which have corrupted the academy over the course of the last century combined with an equally frank discussion of the moral mischief these bad ideas have caused.