Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory

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Northwestern University Press, 1999 M07 21 - 299 pages
Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers—have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, events over structures, inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it.
 

Contents

A Short History of the End of Philosophy
1
The Proximity of Language
19
The Limits of Narrative
69
Poetry and Philosophy inside the Everyday World
131
Notes
219
Bibliography
275
Name Index
291
Subject Index
297
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Page 7 - As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries — not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.

About the author (1999)

Gerald L. Bruns is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His publications include Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy and Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern.

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