Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium

(Paperback)

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As a Jamaican immigrant arriving in the United States at the age of twenty, Jason Hill noticed how often Americans identified themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. He observed, for example, the reluctance of West Indians to joins 'black causes' for fear of losing their identity. He began to ask himself what sort of world he wanted to live in, a quest that in time led him to the idea of the cosmopolitan. In Becoming a Cosmopolitan, Jason D. Hill argues that we need a new understanding of the self. He revives the idea of the cosmopolitan, the person who identifies the world as home. Arguing for the right to forget where we came from, Hill proposes a new moral cosmopolitanism for the new millennium.

Reviews

The fire of individual freedom that burns for Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Dewey, and Sartre now sheds light in Jason Hill's Becoming a Cosmopolitan. Hill develops pragmatic, existentialist, and narrative accounts of how we can choose and make ourselves, despite prefabricated racial, ethnic and national identities. -- Naomi Zack, Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Albany
Impressive study. . . . Becoming a Cosmopolitan is a scholarly treatise on the development of human personality, written from the perspective of a philosopher who has made a thorough analysis of the subject. As an erudite and articulate advocate of the cosmopolitan life, he takes us on an intellectual journey through the realm of philosophy, examining the writings of philosophers ancient and modern on such profound and fundamental issues as the development of self and the process of becoming something better and nobler. * Jamaica Gleaner, July 16, 2000 *
This is a richly insightful book whose essay-like philosophical argument is embedded in the barest sketch of a potent biographyone that describes the author's emigration from Jamaica to the United States. The argument is provocative. * Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy *
An ontological rebel rejecting the categories that limit our freedom, embracing a morality of becoming, arguing for the merit of forgetting, Hill offers us a new moral imagination. -- Leonard Harris, Purdue University

Author Bio

Jason D. Hill is an associate professor of philosophy at De Paul University and author of Beyond Blood Identities.