Horace Kallen

Horace Meyer Kallen (August 11, 1882 – February 16, 1974) was an American philosopher.

Born in the then German Bernstadt (now Bierutów), Silesia to Jacob David Kallen and Esther Rebecca (Glazier), an Orthodox rabbi and his wife, Kallen came to the United States as a child in 1887. He studied philosophy at Harvard University where he was a student of George Santayana, earning his B.A. (magna cum laude) in 1903. That year Kallen was personally hired by future American President Woodrow Wilson, then serving as Princeton's president, to become the first Jew to ever teach at the university. But after teaching English at Princeton for two years, his contract was not renewed, and he returned to Harvard for graduate study and worked as Santayana's assistant. Kallen received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1908 and was awarded a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship to study at Oxford University. He was also a lifetime friend of Alain Locke, whom he met at Harvard and who was the first African-American Rhodes Scholar—and the only one, until the 1960s.

He lectured in philosophy at Harvard from his graduation until 1911, occasionally working as a logic instructor at Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1911, he moved to instruct philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1918, when he was named a professor at The New School in New York City as a founding member, where he remained for the rest of his career.

A pluralist, Kallen opposed any oversimplification of philosophical and vital problems. According to Kallen, denying complications and difficulties is to multiply them, as much as to deny reality to evil would aggravate evil.

He advanced the ideal that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible with each other and that ethnic and racial diversity strengthened America. His critics pointed out his disingenuousness since, as a Jewish intellectual and member of the Zionist Organization of America, his vision of multicultural America was quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state of Israel as a totally Jewish nation. Kallen is credited with coining the term cultural pluralism.

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