Richard Eldridge

In Literature, Life, and Modernity Richard Eldridge focuses on the question of a reader's or a viewer's response to a literary or dramatic work in a specific historical epoch ("modernity"). That is, in contrast with many other philosophical approaches to literature, he avoids fixing attention on any putative doctrinal (moral or political or diagnostic) claims in a literary work. Thereby, and in many other admirable ways, he avoids the danger of treating literature as philosophy manqué, concedes the distinctness of literary experience, and only then asks about the significance of this experience. (In this way his approach is reminiscent to some extent of Schiller's; not bad company to be keeping.) This all amounts to a philosophy of literature of sorts,[1] but avoids a forced "philosophy in literature" or "literature as philosophy" treatment. There are themes and ideas at stake of course, but for distinct historical reasons, Eldridge also thinks of what he generally calls "modern" literature as characterized precisely by the absence of any thematic resolution, and so by a kind of play of possibilities, unsettledness, even homelessness. But, he argues, this is a play of ambiguity that

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is neither emptily literary and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say.

Certain metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are shown to play a role in the defense of Davidson's claims that an empirically constructed theory of truth provides an adequate theory of meaning for any natural language. Dadivson puts forward demonstrative arguments in favor of these presuppositions in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Thought and Talk, and The Method of Truth in Metaphysics. These arguments are examined and found to include controversial and dubitable assumptions as premises. It is then suggested that both these controversial assumptions and Davidson's metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions can be partially defended, however, by dialectical, interpretive, and historical arguments that elucidate the nature of persons.

Recent revisionists about Frege have suggested that, contrary to Dummett's monumental work, Frege is to be understood as primarily an epistemologist, not a theorist of meaning. Currie's book is a valuable contribution to this new way of looking at Frege. Where Sluga, for example, focuses on the historical context of Frege's work and other writers are concerned with special topics such as naming and proof theory, Currie surveys the whole of Frege's career, highlighting his fundamental interest in the nature of mathematical knowledge.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Eldridge ON KNOWING HOW TO LIVE: COLERIDGE'S "FROST AT MIDNIGHT" How ought human beings to live? It is both hard to ignore this question and hard to see how to go about answering it rationally. Moral philosophers have typically presented their works as deserving serious attention because they have supposed them to contain well-argued answers to this question. One very general way of describing the strategy of moral philosophers is to say that they have begun by attempting to specify precisely the sense of "ought" as it is used in this question. Thus "ought" has alternately been taken to mean such things as "would it be profitable for," "in society is it necessary for," "it is typical of ideal," and "would it be rational for." In concert, moral philosophy has alternately been conceived of as a part of a theory of happiness, a theory of civil society, a theory of perfection, or a theory of rationality. But which, if any, of these ways of doing moral philosophy is the correct one? The very proliferation of approaches and answers to the question of how human beings ought to live encourages a kind of despair about whether any rules of conduct can be rationally justified for people in general. Noticing this proliferation, philosophers of a skeptical cast of mind have denied that any rules about how human beings ought to live can be rationally defended. AU putative rational defenses of such rules, so it has been claimed, amount to nothing more than pieces of cant and dogma. Reflecting this intuition, "moralistic" has come sometimes to mean "priggishly preachy." Thus Richard Rorty has observed that "the attempt to answer... the moral agent's request for justifications [of answers to such questions as "What ought we to do with ourselves?" and "How ought we to live?"] with descriptions of a privileged domain [wherein such justifications can be discovered] is the philosopher's special form of bad faith — his special way of substituting pseudo-cognition for morad choice."1 Moral philosophers, or those who would attempt rationally to defend rules about how to live, so Rorty would apparently have it, talk not good scientific sense auid not liberating or entertaining poetic nonsense, but pure humbug. (Rorty adds that "the positivists were absolutely right in thinking it imperative to 213 214Philosophy and Literature extirpate metaphysics, when 'metaphysics' means die attempt to give knowledge of what science cannot know.") We are urged to take a pragmatic attitude toward moral rules. AU diere is to know about rules about how to live is that sometimes some people have made them up and found them useful, not that any of diem have any deeper rational basis. "[T]he claim that the customs of a given society are 'grounded in nature' is not one which [the pragmatist] knows how to argue about. He is a pragmatist because he catnnot see what it would be like for a custom to be so grounded."2 Rorty does not claim that naturalistic talk or the talk of what he calls "atoms-in-the-void science" is die only sensible kind of talk. The remarks of sociologists, psychoanalysts, critics, and so forth are not senseless, according to Rorty. But he does hold diat traditional philosophical talk of knowing morad rules through reflection or reasoning is senseless. The reason for diis is diat no one has ever succeeded in giving "ought" a clear sense in such a way that amy claims of the form "human beings ought to do *" can be rationally justified to everyone. Failing to possess incontrovertibly sound demonstrative arguments for claims diat all human beings ought to adopt certain rules of conduct and failing to possess a mediod, or even a glimmer of a mediod, for constructing such arguments, it may well seem difficult not to feel compelled to adopt Rorty's skeptical attitude toward moral philosophy. Rorty's attitude is not extraordinary ; it is increasingly shared by a public which fails to find in works of moral philosophy the sort of rational defense of rules about how to live which it has been promised. What form could a rational justification of a claim of die form "human beings...

When we imagine, previsage, and remember, do we engage in activities through which our selfhood or personhood is expressed, developed, and understood? In contemporary philosophy, the answer to this question has almost always been "No." Sometimes the self is taken to be a complex biological thing. Generally it is then added that this biological thing engages in certain so-called mental activities. But then how these activities are engaged in is either to be explained physically or modeled in a computer program, so that selfhood is not expressed and understood through these activities, but simply instanced in them. Or sometimes the self is thought, as in Sartre's existentialism, to be completely unconditioned, able to make itself into anything as a result of utterly arbitrary choice. Or sometimes it is thought to be epiphenomenal or fictive--not either a physical or introspectible something, so not a something at all.

BY THE middle of the nineteenth century, serious difficulties in carrying out the Cartesian project of explaining through attention to our ideas how we may know things as they really are had become evident. A satisfactory account of the connection between occurrences of ideas in us and the properties of things apart from our ideas of them, an account promised by Descartes in the Meditations, had not been forthcoming. Descartes' claim that God's omnipotence guarantees that the members of some recognizable class of our ideas, the class of clear and distinct perceptions, represent things as they really are became clearly unsatisfactory as part of a realist theory of knowledge as soon as Hume and Kant had shown the unsoundness of Descartes' proofs of the existence of God. Whether or not God's omnipotence guarantees that we can know things as they are, it had become evident that we lack adequate grounds for claiming to know that this is the case. Consequently, there developed by the middle of the nineteenth century a consensus that we lacked a satisfactory account of how our ideas enable us to know things.

Building on remarks by Dewey, Brandom, and Wittgenstein among others, this paper characterizes and defends a general style of philosophy as elucidatory analysis of concepts in circulation within a culture. The presence of this general style is then traced briefly in Quine and Beardsley. I then raise the question whether there is anything distinctively American about this general style. Drawing on work by Sacvan Bercovitch, I argue that use of this style is motivated by America’s distinctive religious history and that this style is present in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau in a marked way. Finally I turn to an analysis of the work of Stanley Cavell, the most self-conscious contemporary inheritor of this religious history, stylistically and substantively, and I point to connections between the style and the substance of this inheritance

Stanley Cavell’s writing about movies, from the more theoretical and general The World Viewed (1971) to the later works on specific genres (Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears), has a unifying theme: some movies as (successful) art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways. This claim is explained and defended by explicating the details of the medium-specificity of the moving photographic image (and its history of uses) and by focusing on Michael Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl (1990). Though the very ideas of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience naturally prompt some suspicion in a commercialized, pluralistic society, our responses to some movies show that we continue to aspire to a life that embodies them

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes on many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Stanley Cavell has been one of the most creative and independent of contemporary philosophical voices. At the core of his thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory but is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others and of the external world that must be accepted. This volume is the first attempt systematically and accessibly to describe and assess the full range of Cavell's work. There are new accounts of Cavell's contribution to the philosophy of mind and language, the theory of action, ethics, aesthetics, Romanticism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, and film and opera. Outside philosophy the appeal of this volume will be unusually broad.