The Saint Louis Philosophical Movement, the newest offering from the Webster University Press, is a guide to a little-known movement that played a crucial role in the development of original philosophical study in the 19th-century United States.

The book's five essays (see Table of Contents) were first presented at an April 2008 conference organized by the Department of Philosophy under the direction of Don Morse, associate professor and the department's current chair. Dubbed the “150th Year Commemoration of the Founding of the St. Louis Hegelians,” the conference explored the movement, its members, and its place in history.

The Saint Louis Philosophical Movement has additional ties to the College of Arts & Sciences: Dean David Carl Wilson--also a philosophy professor--wrote its foreword. Philosophy Professor Britt-Marie Schiller wrote the book's introduction and served as editor.

The main players of the St. Louis Hegelians, formally called the St. Louis Philosophical Society from 1866 on, were William Torrey Harris, a New England transplant to St. Louis; Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, a German immigrant; and Denton Snider, an Oberlin College graduate who became the group's historian. Wilson says in his foreword that members of the movement “are worthy of our close attention because of their commitment to the notion that philosophy must be brought to bear upon life and upon society…Edification, they believed, must be the outcome of philosophy. In this way, they are models to us all.”

In her introduction, Schiller writes that the St. Louis Philosophical Society produced the first “truly philosophical” journal in the U.S. She says Harris' & Brokmeyer's early intellectual collaborations (“a systematic study of German idealism, and in particular an early interpretation of Hegel's work”) helped mold the 19th-century movement.

Schiller summarizes the essays of The Saint Louis Philosophical Movement thus: “Taken together they draw a multifaceted, layered portrait of the development of a distinctive American philosophy, pragmatism, and its lasting impact on American culture, intellectual thought, and social institutions.”

The Saint Louis Philosophical Movement can be purchased through Amazon.com or at the front desk of the Webster University library.