Amelie Rorty

(1932 - 2020)

Philosophy is a dangerous profession, risking censorship, prison, even death. And no wonder: philosophers have questioned traditional pieties and threatened the established political order. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some attacked religion in the name of science; others attacked science in the name of mystical poetry; some served tyrants; others were radical revolutionaries. This historically based collection of philosophers' reflections--the letters, journals, prefaces that reveal their hopes and hesitations, their triumphs and struggles, their deepest doubts and convictions--allow us to witness philosophical thought-in-process. It sheds light on the many--and conflicting--aims of philosophy: to express skepticism or overcome it, to support theology or attack it, to develop an ethical system or reduce it to practical politics. As their audiences differed, philosophers experimented with distinctive rhetorical strategies, writing dialogues, meditations, treatises, aphorisms. Ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, with contributions from 44 philosophers this remarkable collection documents philosophers' claim that they change as well as understand the world. In her introductory essay, "Witnessing Philosophers," Amelie Rorty locates philosophers' reflections in the larger context of the many facets of their other activities and commitments.

Annette Baier sets the title, the genre, and the task of her book from Hume’s essay "Of Moral Prejudices." Rather than arguing from or towards general principles, these essays call upon a wide range of reading, observation, and experience: we are not only meant to be enlightened, but also invited to adopt the reflective habits of mind they exemplify. Like Hume, Baier analyzes and evaluates our attitudes and customs; like him, she finds that our foibles and our strengths are closely linked; and like him, she is both a proponent and a model of good sense. When she is unfairly prejudiced— as she is against what she sees as the harsh and narrow rigors of Kant—she is, with all the bonnehommie of Hume, more ready to tease than to demolish.

Aristotle's philosophy of mind has recently attracted renewed attention and respect from philosophers. This volume brings together outstanding new essays on De Anima by a distinguished international group of contributors including, in this paperback efdition, a new essay by Myles Burnyeat. The essays form a running commentary on the work, covering such topics as the relation between body and soul, sense-perception, imagination, memory, desire, and thought. the authors, writing with philosophical subtlety and wide-ranging scholarship, present the philosophical substance of Aristotle's views to the modern reader. they locate their interpretations firmly within the context of Aristotle's thought as a whole.

While we primarily love individual persons, we also love our work, our homes, our activities and causes. To love is to be engaged in an active concern for the objective well-being—the thriving—of whom and what we love. True love mandates discovering in what that well-being consists and to be engaged in the details of promoting it. Since our loves are diverse, we are often conflicted about the priorities among the obligations they bring. Loving requires constant contextual improvisatory adjustment of priorities among our commitments. Besides delighting in—and being enhanced by—the presence and existence of another person, love requires extended reflection and work.

To be rational is to be engaged in collaborative, corrigible, historically informed inquiry and deliberation. Critical intelligence is merely the beginning of rationality. Substantive rationality also requires reflective and imaginative inquiry. Its active exercise presupposes trust and mandates a commitment to the common good, to responsible attempts to create the political institutions and social conditions on which intellectual and political trust can flourish. Without these, formal and calculative intelligence are – however brilliant – mere cleverness; and without these, rationality can undo itself.

Philosophic writing appears in a variety of genres, addressed to a variety of audiences; it appears nestled within distinctive 'enterprises' : Plato, Berkeley and Hume wrote dialogues; Augustine and Rousseau wrote autobiographical confessions; Mill and Bernard Williams wrote reports to Parliament; Boethius and Descartes wrote meditations; Bacon, Montaign and Hume wrote essays; Aquinas and our contemporaries contribte articles;Leibniz and Hume wrote histories' they all wrote letters and discourses.

"NOTHING," SAYS SPINOZA "can be destroyed except by an external cause." And he adds, "An idea that excludes the existence of our body cannot be in our mind.... The mind endeavors to think of those things that increase or assist the body's power of activity... and to think only of those things that affirm its power of activity". These upbeat passages are mystifying, and sometimes downright disturbing to us dark, obsessive minds, who are prone to think of things that diminish our powers, prone to diminish our powers precisely by thinking about what diminishes us, who are easily capable of thinking of a world that would, could and does exclude us. I want to try to make sense of the motifs expressed in these passages, reading them in such a way that they are not offensive to our sensibility--automatic grounds for distrusting the Spinozistic enterprise. Difficulties remain; but they are the ironies of all Stoics who speak with forked tongue. The optimism of the Stoic-enlightenment program of self-improvement is joined, Janus-faced, with an equally familiar Stoic resignation in the face of necessity. The dynamic energy of conatus as the essence of individuals is revealed as mere partiality: conatus and the individual mind, the contrast between activity and passivity, the contrast between external and internal causes--all these are temporary and temporizing notions which the fully enlightened mind will recognize to be inadequate ideas. Necessary as they are, they are nevertheless merely perspectival. Individuals bent on self-improvement, perceiving themselves bounded by and opposed to the forces of similar individuals, mistake the ontological importance of their individuality and their activities. The Hobbesian strand that is woven through Spinozistic doctrine is visible only within middle-range opinion: it is not ontologically or epistemologically fundamental. Yet, though it is partial and misleading, it remains among the phenomena to be explained. The enlightened will not eliminate but rather explain and understand the middle range talk of conatus, activity and passivity, external and internal, individuals and relations. Indeed, having questioned and even undermined the starting point of individuation, Spinoza returns the repressed: in book 5, particular finite individuals are represented within eternity.

The challenge of explaining the emotions has engaged the attention of the best minds in philosophy and science throughout history. Part of the fascination has been that the emotions resist classification. As adequate account therefore requires receptivity to knowledge from a variety of sources. The philosopher must inform himself of the relevant empirical investigation to arrive at a definition, and the scientist cannot afford to be naive about the assumptions built into his conceptual apparatus. The contributors to this volume have approached the problem of characterizing and classifying emotions from the perspectives of neurophysiology, psychology, and social psychology as well as that of philosophical psychology. They discuss the difficulties that arise in classifying the emotions, assessing their appropriateness and rationality, and determining their function in motivating moral action

Not a day passes but we find ourselves indignant about something or other. When is our indignation justified, and when does it count as moral indignation rather than a legitimate but non-moral gripe? You might think that we should turn to moral theories – to the varieties of utilitarian, Kantian, virtue theories, etc – to answer this question. I shall try to convince you that this is a mistake, that moral theory – as it is ordinarily presently conceived and studied – does not have a specific subject matter, a specific aim, scope or boundaries. You might think that the difference between echt moral indignation and other forms of disapproval is their relative strength or the importance of their target; but moral indignation can be quite faint, directed to a relatively minor transgression and a strongly felt gripe may be directed to a serious but presumptively non-moral infraction. I shall try to persuade you that morality does not constitute an important and distinctive domain with a distinctive set of over-riding norms or a privileged mode of reasoning: morality is everywhere or nowhere in particular. Radical as this claim may sound, I am not a complete Luddite about the matter. Traditional moral theories nevertheless have important functions. But rather than being competing ‘winner takes all’ explanatory and normative theories, OldSpeak moral systems function heuristically. They offer a heterogeneous set of reminders, questions, advice, ideals, warnings, considerations for deliberation. While we try to integrate and systematize them, there is no single overarching organizational plan

BACKGROUND: Although placing patients with acute respiratory failure in a prone (face down) position improves their oxygenation 60 to 70 percent of the time, the effect on survival is not known. METHODS: In a multicenter, randomized trial, we compared conventional treatment (in the supine position) of patients with acute lung injury or the acute respiratory distress syndrome with a predefined strategy of placing patients in a prone position for six or more hours daily for 10 days. We enrolled 304 patients, 152 in each group. RESULTS: The mortality rate was 23.0 percent during the 10-day study period, 49.3 percent at the time of discharge from the intensive care unit, and 60.5 percent at 6 months. The relative risk of death in the prone group as compared with the supine group was 0.84 at the end of the study period (95 percent confidence interval, 0.56 to 1.27), 1.05 at the time of discharge from the intensive care unit (95 percent confidence interval, 0.84 to 1.32), and 1.06 at six months (95 percent confidence interval, 0.88 to 1.28). During the study period the mean (+/-SD) increase in the ratio of the partial pressure of arterial oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen, measured each morning while patients were supine, was greater in the prone than the supine group (63.0+/-66.8 vs. 44.6+/-68.2, P=0.02). The incidence of complications related to positioning (such as pressure sores and accidental extubation) was similar in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Although placing patients with acute respiratory failure in a prone position improves their oxygenation, it does not improve survival