This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.

George Yancy is McAnulty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University. He is editor of African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (1998), named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1999.