Crispin Gallagher Sartwell is an American academic, philosopher, and journalist who was a faculty member of the philosophy department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania until he retired in 2023. He has taught philosophy, communication, and political science at Vanderbilt University, University of Alabama, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Dickinson College.
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.
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. According to Sartwell, the action is related to a video, embedded in the blog post, of Miranda Lambert singing "Time to Get a Gun." In September 2016, The Dickinsonian reported that Sartwell had returned to his position and would resume teaching in the spring of 2017.
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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