The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, KuhnUniversity of Chicago Press, 2008 M04 15 - 192 pages In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's The American Scholar, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy. |
From inside the book
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... Harvard : Robert Nozick 70 The Cosmopolitan Alphabet of Art : Arthur C. Danto 86 6 After Philosophy , Democracy : Richard Rorty 103 786 9 An Apology for Skepticism : Stanley Cavell 118 Nietzsche or Aristotle ? Alasdair MacIntyre 137 ...
... Harvard : Robert Nozick 70 The Cosmopolitan Alphabet of Art : Arthur C. Danto 86 6 After Philosophy , Democracy : Richard Rorty 103 786 9 An Apology for Skepticism : Stanley Cavell 118 Nietzsche or Aristotle ? Alasdair MacIntyre 137 ...
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... Harvard- were unforgettable moments . So , too , was the long walk with Richard Rorty , under the white portico of the University of Virginia , a miracle of Jeffersonian order ; the discovery of the precise and remote world of Alasdair ...
... Harvard- were unforgettable moments . So , too , was the long walk with Richard Rorty , under the white portico of the University of Virginia , a miracle of Jeffersonian order ; the discovery of the precise and remote world of Alasdair ...
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... Harvard , created the conditions for an exchange with that area of mitteleuropean thought — Austrian , Czech , and Polish — designated logical positivism or neo - positivism . The Vienna Circle was the principal European moment of ...
... Harvard , created the conditions for an exchange with that area of mitteleuropean thought — Austrian , Czech , and Polish — designated logical positivism or neo - positivism . The Vienna Circle was the principal European moment of ...
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... Harvard University , where he had studied under the guidance of Lewis and Whitehead , who had moved there from England in 1924 . From the time of Quine's first trip to Europe , the history of the Vienna Circle became entwined with that ...
... Harvard University , where he had studied under the guidance of Lewis and Whitehead , who had moved there from England in 1924 . From the time of Quine's first trip to Europe , the history of the Vienna Circle became entwined with that ...
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Contents
1 | |
Willard Van Orman Quine | 27 |
Donald Davidson | 40 |
Hilary Putnam | 55 |
Robert Nozick | 70 |
Arthur C Danto | 86 |
Richard Rorty | 103 |
Stanley Cavell | 118 |
Alasdair MacIntyre | 137 |
Thomas S Kuhn | 153 |
Index | 169 |
Other editions - View all
The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick ... Giovanna Borradori No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
American philosophy analytic movement analytic philosophy argument Aristotelian Austin believe C. I. Lewis Carl Hempel Carnap century concept contemporary context criticism culture Danto Davidson debate deconstruction Derrida Dewey discourse Donald Davidson Emerson empiricism empiricist epistemological ethical Europe European existential Foucault Frankfurt school French going Habermas Hans Reichenbach Harvard Heidegger Hempel hermeneutics Hilary Putnam human idea important intellectual interest intersubjectivity knowledge Kuhn learned liberalism literary logical positivism look losophy MacIntyre Marx Marxism mathematical logic mean metaphysics mind moral never Nietzsche notion Nozick objective paradigms Peirce perspective pher philo philoso Philosophical Explanations philosophy of language political possible post-structuralism pragmatism pragmatist problem Putnam question Quine Quine's rational Richard Rorty role Second World sense social sort Stanley Cavell Structure of Scientific talk theoretical theory things thinkers Thoreau tion tradition translation truth University Vienna Circle virtues vision vocabulary wanted Wittgenstein writing
Popular passages
Page 112 - If in hermeneutics you include "weak thought," which I am familiar with, we have to be clear about it. Neither Dewey nor weak thought imply that history is on our side, or that there is any necessary force that's going to cause a good outcome. On the contrary, there are nine chances out of ten that things will go to hell. However, what is important is the hope that they might not end badly, because they are not fated to go one way or the other.
Page 10 - A fellowship at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University sensitized me to cultural perspectives.
Page 140 - ... knew still belonged with part of themselves. What mattered in this culture were particular loyalties and ties to kinship and land. To be just was to play one's assigned role in the life of one's local community. Each person's identity derived from the person's place in their community and in the conflicts and arguments that constituted its ongoing (or by the time of my childhood no longer ongoing) history.
Page 151 - I am not a communitarian. I do not believe in ideals or forms of community as a nostrum for contemporary social ills. I give my political loyalty to no program" (Borradori, The American Philosopher, 151).
Page 64 - Putnam says that for him (and Dewey) democracy is a "cognitive value" insofar as it is "a requirement for experimental inquiry in any area. To reject democracy is to reject the idea of being experimental.
Page 36 - The way I look at things today is that there isn't only one science, but a big enough bundle of laws not to be comprehended as a single hypothesis. The big enough bundle implies logically some observational conditions,9 namely some categories defining observable situations ... holism is needed to the extent that you have a big enough combination to apply some of these testable categories (Borradori. 1994, p. 36). The theme...
Page 107 - Americans simply had not produced anything in philosophy for a long time. Dewey's best work had been written before 1925, hence for twenty-five years not much had happened in American philosophy — though Dewey was still alive and revered. In the thirties, the German and Austrian emigres began coming over — people like Carnap, Hempel, Tarski, Reichenbach — and, after the Second World War, they simply took over American philosophy departments. They were an explicidy anti-historicist movement,...
Page 114 - I think that deconstruction is an American product. God only knows what it is, it is a very loosely used term. It really applies more to Paul de Man than to Derrida, but a de Manian literary criticism, as far as I know, simply does not exist. However, because we have a hundred thousand professors of English in America, it is part of the training in graduate school. How would you define the difference between "deconstruction" and "textualism," the very successful term you coined in Consequences of...