Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics: they tried to understand the world by breaking it down into the smallest possible bits. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism.
In this intellectual tour--essays spanning thirty years--William Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary in the search to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. Evolution forms the natural world not as Laplace's all-seeing demon but as a backwoods mechanic fixing and re-fashioning machines out of whatever is at hand. W. V. Quine's lost search for a "desert ontology" leads instead to Wimsatt's walk through a tropical rain forest.
This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world. Against eliminative reductionism, Wimsatt pits new perspectives to deal with emerging natural and social complexities. He argues that our philosophy should be rooted in heuristics and models that work in practice, not only in principle. He demonstrates how to do this with an analysis of the strengths, the limits, and a recalibration of our reductionistic and analytic methodologies. Our aims are changed and our philosophy is transfigured in the process.
Raymond Geuss is one of the most inventive and distinctive voices in contemporary political philosophy and a trenchant critic of the field’s dominant assumptions. In Reality and Its Dreams, he challenges the “normative turn” in political philosophy—the idea that the right approach to politics is to start from thinking abstractly about our own normative views and then, when they have been clarified and systematized, apply them to judging political structures, decisions, and events. Rather, the study of politics should be focused on the sphere of real politics, not least because normative judgments always arise from concrete historical configurations of power, including ideological power.
It is possible to do this without succumbing to a numbing or toxic form of relativism or abandoning utopianism, although utopianism needs to be reunderstood. The utopian impulse is not an attempt to describe a perfect society but an impulse to think the impossible in politics, to articulate deep-seated desires that cannot be realized under current conditions, and to imagine how conditions that seem invariant can be changed.
Geuss ranges widely across philosophy, literature, and art, exploring past and present ideas about such subjects as envy, love, satire, and evil and the work of figures as diverse as John Rawls, St. Augustine, Rabelais, and Russell Brand. His essays provide a bracing critique of ideas, too often unexamined, that shape and misshape our intellectual and political worlds.
Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality offers an original account of the intentionality of human mental states, such as beliefs and desires.
The account of intentionality in Rational Animals is broadly biological in its basis, emphasizing the continuity between human intentionality and the levels of intentionality that should be attributed to animal actions and states.
Establishing the goal-directed character of animal behavior, Mark Okrent argues that instrumentally rational action is a species of goal-directed behavior that is idiosyncratic to individual agents and is distinguished by its novelty and flexibility. He also argues that some nonlinguistic animals are capable of instrumental rationality and that in the first instance, the contents of beliefs and desires are individuated by the explanatory role of those states in rationxadally accounting for such instrumentally rational behavior.
The account of instrumental rationality offered in Rational Animals allows for understanding the practical rationality of linguistically competent human beings as a distinctive capacity of social animals capable of undertaking roles governed by socially sanctioned norms.
Rational Animals will be of interest to cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, philosophers of biology, philosophers of action, ethologists, and those interested in the debates concerning animal intelligence.
The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, one of the most groundbreaking works of twentieth-century Platonic studies, is now back in print for a new generation of students and scholars to discover. In this volume, distinguished classicist Seth Benardete interprets and pairs two important Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, illuminating Socrates’ notion of rhetoric and Plato’s conception of morality and eros in the human soul.
Following his discussion of the Gorgias as a dialogue about the rhetoric of morality, Benardete turns to the Phaedrus as a discourse about genuine rhetoric, namely the science of eros, or true philosophy. This novel interpretation addresses numerous issues in Plato studies: the relation between the structure of the Gorgias and the image of soul/city in the Republic, the relation between the structure of Phaedrus and the concept of eros, and Socrates’ notion of ignorance, among others.
A close and selective commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, offering a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s teachings on the relation between reason and moral virtue.
What does it mean to live a good life or a happy life, and what part does reason play in the quest for fulfillment? Lorraine Smith Pangle shows how Aristotle’s arguments for virtue as the core of happiness and for reason as the guide to virtue emerge in response to Socrates’s paradoxical claim that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance.
Against Socrates, Aristotle does justice to the effectual truth of moral responsibility—that our characters do indeed depend on our own voluntary actions. But he also incorporates Socratic insights into the close interconnection of passion and judgment and the way passions and bad habits work not to overcome knowledge that remains intact but to corrupt the knowledge one thinks one has. Reason and Character presents fresh interpretations of Aristotle’s teaching on the character of moral judgment and moral choice, on the way reason finds the mean—especially in justice—and on the relation between practical and theoretical wisdom.
In his monumental Philosophy of the Kalam the late Harry Wolfson—truly the most accomplished historian of philosophy in our century—examined the early medieval system of Islamic philosophy. He studies its repercussions in Jewish thought in this companion book—an indispensable work for all students of Jewish and Islamic traditions.
Wolfson believed that ideas are contagious, but that for beliefs to catch on from one tradition to another the recipients must be predisposed, susceptible. Thus he is concerned here not so much with the influence of Islamic ideas as with Jewish elaboration, adaptation, qualification, and criticism of them. To this end he examines passages reflecting Kalam views by a wide variety of Jewish thinkers, including Isaac Israeli, Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Maimonides. As always in Wolfson's work, two aspects are apparent: the special dimensions of Jewish thought as well as its relation to other traditions. And as always his prose is both graceful and precise.
In this first comprehensive study of the effect of Lucretius's De rerum natura on Florentine thought in the Renaissance, Alison Brown demonstrates how Lucretius was used by Florentine thinkers—earlier and more widely than has been supposed—to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies.
To answer the question of why ordinary Florentines were drawn to this recently discovered text, despite its threat to orthodox Christian belief, Brown tracks interest in it through three humanists—the most famous of whom was Machiavelli—all working not as philologists but as practical administrators and teachers in the Florentine chancery and university. Interpreting their direct use of Lucretius within the context of mercantile Florence, Brown highlights three dangerous themes that had particular appeal: Lucretius's attack on superstitious religion and an afterlife; his pre-Darwinian theory of evolution; and his atomism, with its theory of free will and the chance creation of the world.
The humanists' challenge to established beliefs encouraged the growth of a "Lucretian network" of younger, politically disaffected Florentines. Brown thus adds a missing dimension to our understanding of the "revolution" in sixteenth-century political thinking, as she enriches our definition of the Renaissance in a context of newly discovered worlds and new social networks.
Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry.
Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric’s guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy’s concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Innovative readings of Hobbes and Vico allow her to reexamine rhetoric’s role in the history of modernity and to make fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there she turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity is a novel rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.
The great American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson and the influential German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, though writing in different eras and ultimately developing significantly different philosophies, both praised the individual’s wish to be transformed, to be fully created for the first time. Emerson and Nietzsche challenge us to undertake the task of identity on our own, in order to see (in Nietzsche’s phrase) “how one becomes what one is.”
David Mikics’s The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche examines the argument, as well as the affinity, between these two philosophers. Nietzsche was an enthusiastic reader of Emerson and inherited from him an interest in provocation as a means of instruction, an understanding of the permanent importance of moods and transitory moments in our lives, and a sense of the revolutionary character of impulse. Both were deliberately outrageous thinkers, striving to shake us out of our complacency.
Rather than choosing between Emerson and Nietzsche, Professor Mikics attends to Nietzsche’s struggle with Emerson’s example and influence. Elegant in its delivery, The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche offers a significant commentary on the visions of several contemporary theorists whose interests intersect with those of Emerson and Nietzsche, especially Stanley Cavell, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Harold Bloom.
Contributors. Richard Bernstein, David Bromwich, Ray Carney, Stanley Cavell, Morris Dickstein, John Patrick Diggins, Stanley Fish, Nancy Fraser, Thomas C. Grey, Giles Gunn, Hans Joas, James T. Kloppenberg, David Luban, Louis Menand, Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Poirier, Richard A. Posner, Ross Posnock, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michel Rosenfeld, Richard H. Weisberg, Robert B. Westbrook, Alan Wolfe
Transcendentalism never came to an end in America. It just went underground for a stretch, but is back in full force in Robert Brandom’s new book. Brandom takes up Kant and Hegel and explores their contemporary significance as if little time had expired since intellectuals gathered around Emerson in Concord to discuss reason and idealism, selves, freedom, and community. Brandom’s discussion belongs to a venerable tradition that distinguishes us as rational animals, and philosophy by its concern to understand, articulate, and explain the notion of reason that is thereby cast in that crucial demarcating role.
An emphasis on our capacity to reason, rather than merely to represent, has been growing in philosophy over the last thirty years, and Robert Brandom has been at the center of this development. Reason in Philosophy is the first book that gives a succinct overview of his understanding of the role of reason as the structure at once of our minds and our meanings—what constitutes us as free, responsible agents. The job of philosophy is to introduce concepts and develop expressive tools for expanding our self-consciousness as sapients: explicit awareness of our discursive activity of thinking and acting, in the sciences, politics, and the arts. This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.
The time has come to reform philosophy, says Hilary Putnam, one of America’s great philosophers. He calls upon philosophers to attend to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to represent. Putnam’s goal is to embed philosophy in social life.
The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists on describing both the mind and the world from a God’s-eye view. In its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made world, and philosophy should not be in that business either.
The author moves on to show that the larger human context in which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to Quine and Goodman.
This book connects issues in metaphysics with cultural and literary issues and argues that the collapse of philosophical realism does not entail a fall into the abyss of relativism and postmodern skepticism. It is aimed primarily at philosophers but should appeal to a wide range of humanists and social scientists.
Through detailed and trenchant criticism of standard interpretations of some of the key arguments in analytical philosophy over the last sixty years, this book arrives at a new conception of the proper starting point and task of the philosophy of language.
To understand central topics in the philosophy of language and mind, Gary Ebbs contends, we must investigate them from our perspective as participants in shared linguistic practices; but our efforts at adopting this participant perspective are limited by our lingering loyalties to metaphysical realism (the view that we can make objective assertions only if we can grasp metaphysically independent truth conditions) and scientific naturalism (the view that it is only within science that reality can be identified and described). In Rule-Following and Realism, Ebbs works to loosen the hold of these views by exposing their roots and developing a different way of looking at our linguistic practices.
Reexamining and extending influential arguments by Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, and Tyler Burge, Ebbs presents systematic redescriptions of our linguistic practices that transform our understanding of such central topics as rule-following, the analytic-synthetic distinction, realism, anti-individualism, the division of linguistic labor, self-knowledge, and skepticism.
Realism for the 21st Century is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely—a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely’s development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on “purely objective reality.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, physicist, mathematician, and the founder of pragmatism. Despite his importance in the history of philosophy, a unified statement of his thought has been unavailable. With this publication, readers at long last are offered the philosopher’s only known, complete, and coherent account of his own work. Originally delivered as the Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, Reasoning and the Logic of Things is the most accessible and thorough introduction to Peirce’s mature thought to be found within the compass of a single book.
Beginning with an explanation of the nature of philosophy, Peirce proceeds to illustrate his claim that mathematics provides the foundation of our logic and metaphysics. We find here the clearest formulation of an idea present in Peirce’s thought since the 1860s, the distinction between three kinds of reasoning: induction, deduction, and retroduction. Then follows an introduction to Peirce’s chief logical doctrines, as well as his attempts to provide a classification of the sciences, a theory of categories, and a theory of science. In conclusion, turning from “reasoning” to the “logic of things,” Peirce called for an evolutionary cosmology to explain the reality of laws and described the kinds of reasoning he employed in developing this cosmology.
At the urging of his friend William James, Peirce made an uncharacteristic effort in these lectures to present his ideas in terms intelligible to a general audience—those without advanced training in logic and philosophy. The introductory materials by Kenneth Ketner and Hilary Putman add to the volume’s lucidity. Consequently, this book will be a valuable source for readers outside of the circle of Peirce specialists.
In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful.
In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being.
Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.
At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur’s thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology.
Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus directly on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume, The Just, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume, Reflections on the Just, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur’s meditations on the concept.
Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays, Reflections on the Just continues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another and The Just. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms.
Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, Reflections on the Just is an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur’s thought in his final years.
This volume, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death, brings together thirteen of Crispin Wright's most influential essays on Wittgenstein's later philosophies of language and mind, many hard to obtain, including the first publication of his Whitehead Lectures given at Harvard in 1996.
Organized into four groups, the essays focus on issues about following a rule and the objectivity of meaning; on Saul Kripke's contribution to the interpretation of Wittgenstein; on privacy and self-knowledge; and on aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. Wright uses the cutting edge of Wittgenstein's thought to expose and undermine the common assumptions in platonistic views of mathematical and logical objectivity and Cartesian ideas about self-knowledge. The great question remains: How to react to the demise of these assumptions? In response, the essays develop a concerted, evolving approach to the possibilities--and limitations--of constructive philosophies of mathematics and mind. Their collection constitutes a major statement by one of Britain's most important philosophers--and will provide an indispensable tool both for students of Wittgenstein and for scholars working more generally in the metaphysics of mind and language.
In Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics, Cora Diamond follows two major European philosophers as they think about thinking, as well as about our ability to respond to thinking that has miscarried or gone astray. Acting as both witness to and participant in the encounter, Diamond provides fresh perspective on the importance of the work of these philosophers and the value of doing philosophy in unexpected ways.
Diamond begins with the Tractatus (1921), in which Ludwig Wittgenstein forges a link between thinking about thought and the capacity to respond to misunderstandings and confusions. She then considers G. E. M. Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959), in which Anscombe, through her engagement with Wittgenstein, further explores the limits of thinking and the ability to respond to thought that has gone wrong. Anscombe’s book is important, Diamond argues, in challenging contemporary assumptions about what philosophical problems are worth considering and about how they can be approached. Through her reading of the Tractatus, Anscombe exemplified an ethics of thinking through and against the grain of common preconceptions. The result drew attention to the questions that mattered most to Wittgenstein and conveyed with great power the nature of his achievement.
Diamond herself, in turn, challenges Anscombe on certain points, thereby further carrying out just the kind of ethical work Wittgenstein and Anscombe each felt was crucial to getting things right. Through her textured engagement with her predecessors, Diamond demonstrates what genuinely independent thought is able to achieve.
Remembering Paradise studies three major eighteenth-century nativist scholars in Japan: Kada no Azumamaro, Kamo no Mabuchi, and the celebrated Motoori Norinaga. Peter Nosco demonstrates that these scholars, frequently depicted as the formulators of rabid xenophobia, were intellectuals engaged in a quest for meaning, wholeness, and solace in what they perceived to be disordered times. He traces the emergence and development of their philosophies, identifying elements of continuity into the eighteenth century from the singular Confucian-nativist discourse of the seventeenth century. He also describes the rupture between nativism and Confucianism at the start of the eighteenth century and the quest for ancient, distinctly Japanese values.
The emphasis on patriotism and nostalgia in the works of these three scholars may have relevance to the kind of nationalism emerging in Japan in the 1980s, manifested in a renewed interest in visiting one's home place and in the history and culture of the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. The current fusion of nationalism and nostalgia can perhaps be better understood through Nosco's analysis of comparable sentiments that were important in earlier times.
The turmoil and brutality of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to maintain faith in the ability of reason to fashion a stable and peaceful world. After the ravages of global conflict and a Cold War that divided the world's loyalties, how are we to master our doubts and face the twenty-first century with hope?
In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of knowledge. The centuries-old dominance of rationality, a mathematical mode of reasoning modeled on theory and universal certainties, has diminished the value of reasonableness, a system of humane judgments based on personal experience and practice. To this day, academic disciplines such as economics and professions such as law and medicine often value expert knowledge and abstract models above the testimony of diverse cultures and the practical experience of individuals.
Now, at the beginning of a new century, Toulmin sums up a lifetime of distinguished work and issues a powerful call to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness. His vision does not reject the valuable fruits of science and technology, but requires awareness of the human consequences of our discoveries. Toulmin argues for the need to confront the challenge of an uncertain and unpredictable world, not with inflexible ideologies and abstract theories, but by returning to a more humane and compassionate form of reason, one that accepts the diversity and complexity that is human nature as an essential beginning for all intellectual inquiry.
“A picture held us captive,” writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe.
According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This “mediational” epistemology—internal ideas mediating external reality—continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it—by handling things, moving among them, responding to them—and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes’s privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared.
Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with—trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations—fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.
An examination of philosophical realism from the standpoint of pragmatic epistemology, this book addresses the core idea of Rescher's work in epistemology: that functional and pragmatic concerns exert a controlling influence on the conduct of rational inquiry and on the ways in which we can and should regard its products.
Pragmatism is widely regarded as a philosophical approach that stands at odds with realism, but Rescher takes a very different approach. He views pragmatism as a realistic position that can be developed from a pragmatic point of view, and utilizes a number of case studies to augment his position. Throughout, he shows how the pragmatic and purposive setting of our putative knowledge of the real world proves to be crucial for the constituting and also for the constitution of our knowledge.
Contributors. Barry Barnes, Dagmar Barnouw, Lorraine Code, Lorraine Daston, Johannes Fabian, Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary E. Hawkesworth, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Evelyn Fox Keller, George Levine, Allan Megill, Peter Miller, Andy Pickering, Theodore M. Porter
Readings in Interpretation was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Readings in Interpretation — a volume primarily on the texts of Holderlin, Hegel, and their interpreter Heidegger—locates itself strategically between literature and philosophy. In keeping with this juxtaposition, it treats the question of self-consciousness and reflection on the levels of "theme" and "text." For both Hegel and Holderlin, selfconsciousness and its relation to knowing are explicit themes, but Waminski's readings show that a more disruptive reflection is operative on the level of text.
In an argument that centers on the textual aspects of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit,Warminski demonstrates that the negative moment—which is often interpreted as a prelude to a unified self-consciousness—cannot be accounted for by interpretive models drawn from outside the text—by concepts like the self, consciousness, or the subject. Instead, a completely different practice and theory is necessary. The author's "Prefatory Postscript" at the beginning of the book therefore serves as an introduction to sketch the theoretical basis of the readings that follow and as a "postscript" that explains the difference between "reading" and "interpretation" which those readings make necessary.
Julia Tanney offers a sustained criticism of today’s canon in philosophy of mind, which conceives the workings of the rational mind as the outcome of causal interactions between mental states that have their bases in the brain. With its roots in physicalism and functionalism, this widely accepted view provides the philosophical foundation for the cardinal tenet of the cognitive sciences: that cognition is a form of information-processing. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge presents a challenge not only to the cognitivist approach that has dominated philosophy and the special sciences for the last fifty years but, more broadly, to metaphysical-empirical approaches to the study of the mind.
Responding to a tradition that owes much to the writings of Davidson, early Putnam, and Fodor, Tanney challenges this orthodoxy on its own terms. In untangling its internal inadequacies, starting with the paradoxes of irrationality, she arrives at a view these philosophers were keen to rebut—one with affinities to the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein and all but invisible to those working on the cutting edge of analytic philosophy and mind research today. This is the view that rational explanations are embedded in “thick” descriptions that are themselves sophistications upon ever ascending levels of discourse, or socio-linguistic practices.
Tanney argues that conceptual cartography rather than metaphysical-scientific explanation is the basic tool for understanding the nature of the mind. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge clears the path for a return to the world-involving, circumstance-dependent, normative practices where the rational mind has its home.
Renunciation as a creative force in the careers of writers, philosophers, and artists is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock’s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of artists and intellectuals to society in productive and unpredictable ways.
In a work of remarkable synthesis that includes traditions and genres from antiquity to postmodernity, Posnock discovers connections among disparate figures ranging from Lao Tzu to Dave Chappelle and Bob Dylan. The thread running through these acts of renunciation, he argues, is an aesthetic and ethical resistance to the demand that one’s words and actions be straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Modern art in particular valorizes the nonconceptual and the intuitive, seeking to make silence articulate and incompletion fertile.
Renouncers reject not only artistic and scholarly conventions but also the public roles that attend them. Wittgenstein, Rimbaud, and Glenn Gould brazenly flouted professional and popular expectations, demanding that philosophy, poetry, music play by new rules. Emerson and Nietzsche severed all institutional ties, while William James waged a guerrilla campaign from his post at Harvard against what all three considered to be the enemy: the pernicious philosophical insistence on rationality. Posnock also examines renunciations in light of World War II—the veterans J. D. Salinger and George Oppen, and the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—while a fourth cluster includes the mystic Thomas Merton and the abstract painters Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin.
We explain what people think and do by citing their reasons, but how do such explanations work, and what do they tell us about the nature of reality? Contemporary efforts to address these questions are often motivated by the worry that our ordinary conception of rationality contains a kernel of supernaturalism—a ghostly presence that meditates on sensory messages and orchestrates behavior on the basis of its ethereal calculations. In shunning this otherworldly conception, contemporary philosophers have focused on the project of “naturalizing” the mind, viewing it as a kind of machine that converts sensory input and bodily impulse into thought and action. Eric Marcus rejects this choice between physicalism and supernaturalism as false and defends a third way.
He argues that philosophers have failed to take seriously the idea that rational explanations postulate a distinctive sort of causation—rational causation. Rational explanations do not reveal the same sorts of causal connections that explanations in the natural sciences do. Rather, rational causation draws on the theoretical and practical inferential abilities of human beings. Marcus defends this position against a wide array of physicalist arguments that have captivated philosophers of mind for decades. Along the way he provides novel views on, for example, the difference between rational and nonrational animals and the distinction between states and events.
At its zenith in the early twentieth century, the British Empire ruled nearly one-quarter of the world’s inhabitants. As they worked to exercise power in diverse and distant cultures, British authorities relied to a surprising degree on the science of mind. Ruling Minds explores how psychology opened up new possibilities for governing the empire. From the mental testing of workers and soldiers to the use of psychoanalysis in development plans and counterinsurgency strategy, psychology provided tools for measuring and managing the minds of imperial subjects. But it also led to unintended consequences.
Following researchers, missionaries, and officials to the far corners of the globe, Erik Linstrum examines how they used intelligence tests, laboratory studies, and even dream analysis to chart abilities and emotions. Psychology seemed to offer portable and standardized forms of knowledge that could be applied to people everywhere. Yet it also unsettled basic assumptions of imperial rule. Some experiments undercut the racial hierarchies that propped up British dominance. Others failed to realize the orderly transformation of colonized societies that experts promised and officials hoped for. Challenging our assumptions about scientific knowledge and empire, Linstrum shows that psychology did more to expose the limits of imperial authority than to strengthen it.
Repossessions was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A double-edged critical forum, this volume brings early modern culture and psychoanalysis into revisionist dialogue with each other. The authors reflect on how psychoanalysis remains
"possessed" by its incorporation of early modern mythologies, visions, credos, and phantasms. Their essays explore the conceptual and ideological foundations of psychoanalysis while articulating fresh insights into the vicissitudes of autobiography, translation, mourning, and eroticism in the transitional period from the waning of feudalism to the emergence of capitalism.Employing a broad spectrum of the most recent, Continental psychoanalytic approaches, the book covers topics and figures ranging from King James to Leonardo, demonology to cartography, astronomy to cross-dressing, and mythology to biology. Its detailed readings of Boccaccio, Ficino, Finé, Michelangelo, Montaigne, and others dramatically reassess the foundational concepts of cultural history, secularization, autobiography, reason, and government. Through a sustained focus on visual and verbal residues of personal and cultural trauma, the essays generate innovative analyses of the interrelation of writing, graphic space, self, and social identification in early modern texts, paintings, maps, and other artifacts.
Contributors: Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Tom Conley, Mitchell Greenberg, Kathleen Perry Long, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Christopher Pye, Juliana Schiesari.
Timothy Murray is professor of English and director of graduate studies in Film and Video at Cornell University. Alan K. Smith is assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah.
There are more psychoanalytic theories today than anyone knows what to do with, and the heterogeneity and complexity of the entire body of psychoanalytic though have become staggering. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Stephen A. Mitchell weaves strands from the principal relational-model traditions (interpersonal psychoanalysis, British school object-relations theories, self psychology, and existential psychoanalysis) into a comprehensive approach to many of the knottiest problems and controversies in theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis.
Mitchell’s earlier book, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, co-authored with Jay Greenberg, set the stage for this current integration by providing a broad comparative analysis of important thinking on the nature of human relationships. In that classic study Greenberg and Mitchell distinguished between two basic paradigms: the drive model, in which relations with others are generated and shaped by the need for drive gratifications, and various relational models, in which relations themselves are taken as primary and irreducible. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Mitchell argues that the drive model has since outlived its usefulness. The relational model, on the other hand, has been developed piecemeal by different authors who rarely acknowledge and explore the commonality of their assumptions or the rich complementarity of their perspectives.
In this bold effort at integrative theorizing, Mitchell draws together major lines of relational-model traditions into a unified framework for psychoanalytic thought, more economical than the anachronistic drive model and more inclusive than any of the singular relational approaches to the core significance of sexuality, the impact of early experience, the relation of the past to the present, the interpenetration of illusion and actuality, the centrality of the will, the repetition of painful experience, the nature of analytic situation, and the process of analytic change. As such, his book will be required reading for psychoanalytic scholars, practitioners, candidates in psychoanalysis, and students in the field.
Viewing our past through the eyes of maturity can reveal insights that our younger selves could not see. Lessons that eluded us become apparent. Encounters that once felt like misfortunes now become understood as valued parts of who we are. We realize what we’ve learned and what we have to teach. And we’re encouraged to chart a future that is rich with purpose.
In A Round of Golf with My Father, William Damon introduces us to the “life review.” This is a process of looking with clarity and curiosity at the paths we’ve traveled, examining our pasts in a frank yet positive manner, and using what we’ve learned to write purposeful next chapters for our lives.
For Damon, that process began by uncovering the mysterious life of his father, whom he never met and never gave much thought to. What he discovered surprised him so greatly that he was moved to reassess the events of his own life, including the choices he made, the relationships he forged, and the career he pursued.
Early in his life, Damon was led to believe that his father had been killed in World War II. But the man survived and went on to live a second life abroad. He married a French ballerina, started a new family, and forged a significant Foreign Service career. He also was an excellent golfer, a bittersweet revelation for Damon, who wishes that his father had been around to teach him the game.
We follow Damon as he struggles to make sense of his father’s contradictions and how his father, even though living a world apart, influenced Damon’s own development in crucial ways. In his life review, Damon uses what he learned about his father to enhance his own newly emerging self-knowledge.
Readers of this book may come away inspired to conduct informal life reviews for themselves. By uncovering and assembling the often overlooked puzzle pieces of their pasts, readers can seek present-day contentment and look with growing optimism to the years ahead.
The angry emotions, and the problems they presented, were an ancient Greek preoccupation from Homer to late antiquity. From the first lines of the Iliad to the church fathers of the fourth century A.D., the control or elimination of rage was an obsessive concern. From the Greek world it passed to the Romans.
Drawing on a wide range of ancient texts, and on recent work in anthropology and psychology, Restraining Rage explains the rise and persistence of this concern. W. V. Harris shows that the discourse of anger-control was of crucial importance in several different spheres, in politics--both republican and monarchical--in the family, and in the slave economy. He suggests that it played a special role in maintaining male domination over women. He explores the working out of these themes in Attic tragedy, in the great Greek historians, in Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers, and in many other kinds of texts.
From the time of Plato onward, educated Greeks developed a strong conscious interest in their own psychic health. Emotional control was part of this. Harris offers a new theory to explain this interest, and a history of the anger-therapy that derived from it. He ends by suggesting some contemporary lessons that can be drawn from the Greek and Roman experience.
In his foundational work The Restoration of the Self, noted psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut boldly challenges what he called “the limits of classical analytic theory” and the Freudian orthodoxy. Here Kohut proposes a “psychology of the self” as a theory in its own right—one that can stand beside the teachings of Freud and Jung.
Using clinical data, Kohut explores issues such as the role of narcissism in personality, when a patient can be considered cured, and the oversimplifications and social biases that unduly influenced Freudian thought. This volume puts forth some of Kohut’s most influential ideas on achieving emotional health through a balanced, creative, and joyful sense of self.
"Kohut speaks clearly from his identity as a psychoanalyst-healer, showing that he is more of a psychoanalyst than most, and yet calling for major theoretical revisions including a redefinition of the essence of psychoanalysis.”—American Journal of Psychotherapy
Decades of work in psychology labs have vastly enhanced our knowledge about how children perceive, think, and reason. But it has also encouraged a distorted view of children, argues psychologist Susan Engel in this provocative and passionate book--a view that has affected every parent who has tried to debate with a six-year-old. By focusing on the thinking processes prized by adults, too many expert opinions have rendered children as little adults. What has been lost is what is truly unique and mysterious--the childlike quality of a child's mind.
Engel draws on keen observations and descriptive research to take us into the nearly forgotten, untidy, phantasmagorical world of children's inner lives. She reminds us that children fuse thought and emotion, play and reality; they swing wildly between different ways of interpreting and acting in the world. But just as a gawky child may grow into a beauty, illogical and sometimes maddening childishness can foreshadow great adult ability.
Engel argues that the "scientist in a crib" view encourages parents and teachers to expect more logical reasoning and emotional self-control from children than they possess. She provides a concise and valuable overview of what modern developmental psychologists have learned about children's developing powers of perception and capacity for reasoning, but also suggests new ways of studying children that better capture the truth about their young minds.
The Relationship Code is the report of a longitudinal study, conducted over a ten-year period, of the influence of family relationships and genetic factors on competence and psychopathology in adolescent development. The sample for this landmark study included 720 pairs of same-sex adolescent siblings—including twins, half siblings, and genetically unrelated siblings—and their parents.
Using a clear expressive style, David Reiss and his coinvestigators identify specific mechanisms that link genetic factors and the social environment in psychological development. They propose a striking hypothesis: family relationships are crucial to the expression of genetic influences on a broad array of complex behaviors in adolescents. Moreover, this role of family relationships may be very specific: some genetic factors are linked to mother–child relationships, others to father–child relations, some to relationship warmth, while others are linked to relationship conflict or control. The specificity of these links suggests that family relationships may constitute a code for translating genetic influences into the ontogeny of behaviors, a code every bit as important for behavior as DNA-RNA.
A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideas
What sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium and “rough metaphysician” Jane Roberts (1929–1984). Through a close interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled personalities—including one, named “Seth,” who would inspire the New Age movement—Skafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology, translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Roberts’s writings contain philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in other cultural traditions undertake it? What can outsider thinkers teach us about the limitations of even our most critical intellectual habits?
Rough Metaphysics is at once an ethnography of the books of a strange and yet remarkable writer, a commentary on the unlikely philosophy contained in them, and a call for a new way of doing (and undoing) philosophy through anthropology, and vice versa. In guiding the reader through Roberts’s often hallucinatory “world of concepts,” Skafish also develops a series of original interpretations of thinkers—from William James to Claude Lévi-Strauss to Paul Feyerabend—who have been vital to anthropologists and their fellow travelers.
Seductively written and surprising in its turns of thought, Rough Metaphysics is a feast for anyone who wants to learn how to think something new, especially about thought.
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