METAPHILOSOPHY最新文献

This response to Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing focuses on his concern that philosophy is, first and foremost, a way of life, illustrated in the West by the Socratic ideal of the philosopher and in the East by the example of the scholar-artist-gentleman. This paper examines the process of Buddhist meditation and the process of creating novels, supplementing the authors Shusterman carefully examines with examples from Black American literature, the author's own teacher John Gardner, and artistic colleagues the author has known. The basic thrust of the response is that the skillful means used in writing can indeed be a form of self-creation, but it can also be a means of liberation from the self.

Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing suggests something vital about the tension between philosophical discourses that cannot capture or be the full meaning of living a life in relation to wisdom, and lived philosophies that cannot do away with discourses to deepen a lived experience beyond them: that philosophy as “an embodied way of life” is a sub-creation that emerges from the tension between them. This paper uses several different moments and ideas from Philosophy and the Art of Writing as points of departure for further inquiry. Some “memories,” repurposed, reorganized, and manipulated, take up these starting points to further the investigation. The present work was a spiritual exercise for the author and, one hopes, will be for the reader in what it means to practice philosophy as a way of life. By doing so, we may find more forgiveness and appreciation for our philosophical vocation that creates something more than what we say or are now.

This introductory piece provides context for this symposium on Richard Shusterman's new book, Philosophy and the Art of Writing. The piece reflects on the symposium genre from Plato's classic dialogue to its form today. It claims that Shusterman's work asks us to take this kind of philosophical writing more seriously, and for that reason the symposium itself has taken on a different structure. The piece discusses how each of the contributors responding to the book (with Shusterman leading the way), Eli Kramer, Randall Auxier, and Charles Johnson, have engaged in practicing, nurturing, and supporting broad modes of philosophical writing, and in turn why they have chosen to do so in this context.

It has been suggested that philosophers should adopt a methodology largely inspired by mathematics and that the “mathematical” virtues of rigor, clarity, and precision are also fundamental philosophical virtues. In reply, this paper argues that some excellent philosophy lacks these virtues and that too much emphasis on the mathematical virtues excludes potentially valuable forms of philosophical discourse and makes the profession less diverse than it should be. Unduly restrictive conceptions of philosophical argumentation should be avoided. On a contributory conception, philosophy should try to make a positive contribution to human emancipation where possible. The paper argues that it is possible and desirable for epistemology to contribute in this way and that the mathematical virtues are less significant in this context than the emancipatory virtues of what one might call “liberation philosophy.” These include irony, reflectiveness, imagination, contrarianism, and worldliness.

According to the received view, philosophy of action took a justified turn towards causalism because anti-causalists failed the causalist challenge about efficacious reasons. This paper contests that view by examining the ways in which Georg Henrik von Wright responded to causalism in his later philosophy. First, von Wright attacked the subjectivism of causalism by arguing for an objectivist view that construes reasons not as subjective mental states but as external facts of the agent's situation. Second, von Wright fundamentally disagreed with the view of philosophical inquiry that underpinned causalism. For von Wright, the task of philosophy was conceptual: to explicate what one is looking for when one is looking for the real reasons for action. In contrast, for causalists the task was ontological: to determine what kind of item in the world the real reason for action is. Examining von Wright's account contributes to contemporary assessments of the metaphilosophical dimension of the reasons/causes debate.

This paper draws a distinction between the existential quantifier and the symbol ‘∃’ used to express it, on the one hand, and existence and ‘exists’, on the other. It argues that some popular arguments in metaphysics, including arguments against vague existence and arguments against deflationary metaontology (which views ontological disputes as lacking substance), are guilty of fudging this distinction. The paper draws some lessons for metaphysical debate about existence and highlights some heretofore ignored and attractive positions in logical space.

There has been a growing interest within analytic philosophy in addressing political and social issues, which has been referred to as the “political turn” in the discipline. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it discusses the very characterization of the political turn. In particular, it introduces the definition proposed by Bordonaba-Plou, Fernández-Castro, and Torices, suggests that we should not consider the turn a form of activism, and explores an additional benefit of the ideal/nonideal distinction for characterizing the turn. Second, it addresses the concern of what attitude we should take in the face of the different sensitivities we might have with respect to what constitutes an injustice. Which philosophical works should count as part of the political turn? The paper explores three different attitudes toward this dilemma, and favors what it calls the revisionist attitude, which emphasizes the fact that our perception of injustice is subject to error.

An examination of late Rorty shows that he does not abandon belief in an external world about which we can, and indeed must, acquire knowledge. His disapproval of the correspondence theory of truth does not involve the idea that anything other than local weather, for example, could falsify remarks about local weather. It is just that once we get done looking out the window or, if we are outside, feeling the right kind of drops make contact with our skin, there is nothing else we can do, nothing better, to make ourselves more certain, more cognitively secure. One can see this in the detailed work that enables scientific progress. Science improves itself by doing more of the same. G. E. Moore's famous open question stays open only as a reminder that our fallibility never disappears and that our cognitive security is never better than pro tem. Rorty, as a faithful pragmatist and undogmatic meliorist, thinks this is perfectly O.K.