Crispin Sartwell

Crispin Gallagher Sartwell (born 1958) is an American philosopher, self-professed anarchist and journalist. He received his B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia—where his dissertation supervisor was Richard Rorty—-and is a member of the philosophy department faculty at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Born in Washington, D.C., he is the son of the late Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, a reporter, editor, and photographer with the Washington Star and several magazines. His grandfather, also Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Washington Times-Herald. His great-grandfather, Herman Bernstein broke the story of a secret correspondence between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas during World War I in The New York Times. Sartwell himself worked as a copy boy at the Washington Star and later as a freelance rock critic for many publications, including Record and Melody Maker. He has taught philosophy, communication and political science at a number of schools, including Vanderbilt University, The University of Alabama, Penn State, Millersville, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Dickinson College.