RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksKaag is particularly successful...in his more recent memoir, Hiking with Nietzsche ... Kaag’s search for Nietzsche...is cyclical and eternal, something that—like Nietzsche himself—comes in many guises and in unexpected, self-disruptive forms. And so, as we delve deeper into Kaag, we delve deeper into Nietzsche—and vice versa ... Kaag is not interested in popularizing philosophy by merely sharing \'its results.\' Instead, he is interested in how philosophy might be more broadly understood—how the ordinary person might come to understand philosophy in its own terms by bearing witness to the subtleties and joys of philosophical inquiry. This, perhaps, is the greatest promise and aspiration of Kaag’s memoirs. He leads a general audience into the delicate and often inaccessible ways in which philosophers seek to understand philosophy’s history ... Kaag has carved out a genre all his own, a genre with the promise to narrow some of the gaps between the esoteric and the familiar, the academic and the non-academic, the philosopher and the self-help guru. For those with Kaag’s unusual mixture of philosophical sophistication and narrative skill, it is a genre well worth emulating.
John Kaag
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksLike Knausgaard, Kaag...is a sort of philosophical everyman (to the extent a tenured philosopher can count as such), much like the eponymous narrator of Knausgaard’s novels is a sort of writerly everyman ... The real action, of course, is not in these relatively mundane occurrences, but rather in Kaag’s thoughts as he moves through them ... In American Philosophy, Kaag is at times too understated in presenting the personal love story—as distinguished from the philosophical love story that unfolds in tandem—that helps tie his book together. A central thread of Kaag’s narrative concerns the dissolution of his first marriage and the emergence, later, of his love for a fellow philosopher. Kaag labors to avoid the impression that this personal love story is at the book’s core, as opposed to Kaag’s broader love affair with philosophy. Yet perhaps because of this, neither Kaag’s first wife nor his soon-to-be second wife comes clearly into focus. And when, in the last quarter of the book, the personal love story begins to recede as we move past some of the uncertainty and yearning of early love, the philosophical love story, left more or less on its own, begins to stall somewhat as well. That American Philosophy loses some of its steam near the end is more a testament to the seamless integration of narrative and philosophy for the remainder of the book than a reflection of any considerable fault.
