Born in Washington,D.C.,Sartwell is the son of Franklin Gallagher Sartwell,a reporter,editor,and photographer. 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 Nicholas II of Russia during World War I in The New York Times.[4] Sartwell worked as a freelance rock critic for publications,including Record and Melody Maker.[5]
Sartwell is best known as a political philosopher,with significant interests in analytic philosophy,aesthetics,and epistemology. As a political philosopher,he has been an advocate of anarchism and individual rights as opposed to the rights of the state. In his 2008 work,Against the State:An Introduction to Anarchist Political Philosophy, he refuted the traditional justifications for the state from Hobbes through Nozick. This was followed by his 2010 work,Political Aesthetics, in which he evaluated various systems based on the assumption that political systems are in part aesthetic systems.[citation needed]
Sartwell's interest in language as a system and its constraints and problems has been a constant in his career. Perhaps his clearest expression of this was in his 2000 publication,End of Story:Toward an Annihilation of Language and History, which posited an academic obsession with language qua language and narrative at the expense of a better conceptual and open dialogue.[citation needed]
As a philosopher of aesthetics as well as of language,Sartwell has seen the issues of beauty as being a constant in the search for meaning. His 2014 book How to Escape:Magic,Madness,Beauty and Cynicism,looked at a wide variety of artistic expressions and experiences from an aesthetics perspective. This followed his previous work,2004's Six Names of Beauty,in which he used different words for beauty in a variety of languages including Greek,Sanskrit,Japanese,and Navajo as a gateway to understanding the cultural diversity and similarities between ideas and manifestations of beauty.[7][8] Later books include Entanglements:A System of Philosophy (2017) and Beauty:A Quick Immersion (2022).
On March 3,2016,Sartwell was placed on leave from his faculty position at Dickinson College in response to posts on his blog in which he accused other philosophy professors of plagiarism.[9] According to Sartwell,the action is related to a video,embedded in the blog post,of Miranda Lambert singing "Time to Get a Gun."[10] In September 2016,The Dickinsonian reported that Sartwell had returned to his position and would resume teaching in the spring of 2017.[11]
Books
The Art of Living:Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions. Albany:SUNY,1995.
Against the State:An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory. Albany:SUNY,2008.
Political Aesthetics. Ithaca:Cornell University Press,2010.[17]
Editor,The Practical Anarchist:Writings of Josiah Warren. New York:Fordham,2011.
How to Escape:Magic,Madness,Beauty,and Cynicism. Albany:SUNY,2014.
Entanglements:A System of Philosophy. Albany:SUNY Press,2017.
Beauty:A Quick Immersion. New York:Tibidabo Publishing,Inc.,2022.
In addition to his books,Sartwell has published more than 40 articles in academic journals such as the British Journal of Aesthetics,Philosophy Today,and American Philosophical Quarterly.
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