Leonard Harris

Leonard Harris is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. His edited collection, Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917 (Kendall/Hunt, 1983), is widely regarded as being the most important pioneering black American philosophy collection in helping to establish the field. (A radically revised second edition would be published in 2000, also by Kendall/Hunt.) More generally, Harris sees himself as the author of “struggle philosophy,” an approach to philosophy that is different from the Socratic dialogue method in highlighting the ethics of insurrection, critical pragmatism, advocacy aesthetics, and the concept of racism as “necro-being.” His other books are the edited The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Temple UP, 1989); the edited The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); the edited Racism (Humanity/Prometheus, 1999), in the press’s “Key Concepts in Critical Theory” series; American Philosophies: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2002), co-edited with Scott L. Pratt and Anne S. Waters; and Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 2008), co-authored with Charles Molesworth. A collection of his essays edited by Lee A. McBride, A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic. Harris is a graduate of Central State University, Ohio, and Cornell University. He is a board member of the Philosophy Born of Struggle Association and the Alain L. Locke Society.