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This seminar takes up one of philosophy's most unsettling questions — what is philosophy itself? — by centering American philosophy as both a prime site of the question's emergence and a focal point for critical efforts to answer it. Beginning with John Dewey's radical argument that philosophy must abandon its self-image as detached spectator and reconnect with the urgencies of social life, the course traces how that demand was taken up and extended by thinkers working within, against, and beyond the American pragmatist tradition. Over the course of the semester, students will be required to develop and defend a position on what philosophy is, knowing that every answer to that question carries a cost.