Walter Jost

ABSTRACT Ever since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, philosophical “pluralism,” a concept barely a hundred years old, has emerged across all the academic disciplines in many different forms as a possible response to variants of skepticism, relativism, and dogmatism. What makes Richard McKeon’s meta-philosophical pluralism distinct from all others is both his focus on philosophical first principles and his rhetorical method of coordinating their possibilities for theoretical development and practical application. Yet McKeon’s lifelong intellectual project remains largely unknown even among philosophers and rhetoricians, a situation the present essay modestly hopes to ameliorate.

This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use.

This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use.

This thought-provoking book initiates a dialogue among scholars in rhetoric and hermeneutics in many areas of the humanities. Twenty leading thinkers explore the ways these two powerful disciplines inform each other and influence a wide variety of intellectual fields. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde organize pivotal topics in rhetoric and hermeneutics with originality and coherence, dividing their book into four sections: Locating the Disciplines; Inventions and Applications; Arguments and Narratives; and Civic Discourse and Critical Theory. Contributors to this volume include Hans-Georg Gadamer (one of whose pieces is here translated into English for the first time), Paul Ricoeur, Gerald L. Bruns, Charles Altieri, Richard E. Palmer, Calvin O. Schrag,.Victoria Kahn, Eugene Garver, Michael Leff, Nancy S. Streuver, Wendy Olmsted, David Tracy, Donald G. Marshall, Allen Scult, Rita Copeland, William Rehg, and Steven Mailloux. For readers across the humanities, the book demonstrates the usefulness of rhetorical and hermeneutic approaches in literary, philosophical, legal, religious, and political thinking. With its stimulating new perspectives on the revival and interrelation of both rhetoric and hermeneutics, this collection is sure to serve as a benchmark for years to come.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:732 BOOK REVIEWS the historical subj.ect" threaten to destroy the transcendental project (p. 190). The variety of approaches to phenomenological theology that are represented in this collection, with the inclusion even of essays that present challenges to the phenomenological project, is a strength in that it provides something to stimulate every reader's interest and prevents the book from being doctrinaire. Steven Laycock's introductory essay goes a long way towards making explicit some of the implications of the various essays and towards sorting out the interrelationships among the views of the contributors. Nevertheless, this reviewer was left with the wish that there had been more of an attempt on the part of the editors to have the individual contributors directly address one another's differing views. This may be an unfair criticism, however, since it is in effect a request for another, more narrowly focused kind of book about phenomenological theology. Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California TIINA ALLIK The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman. By JAY NEWMAN. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: The Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 209. $22.95. Cloth. " It is obvious," wrote the literary critic George Levine in his study of John Henry Newman in The Boundaries of Fiction (Princeton, 1968, p. 195), "that everything [Newman] wrote was aimed at producing an effect, or, to use Mill's terms, at working 'upon the feeling, or upon the belief, or the will of another.' " Whatever else he may or may not have been, Newman was.ever the skilled, even consummate rhetorician-a fact which has been for many tantamount to an admission of his having been, at best an equivocator, at worst a calculating liar. "Like the sophists of old," Kingsley charged Newman in 1864, " he has used reason to destroy reason" (Apologia, Oxford, 1967, p. 370). Of course, Aristotle had a high regard for rhetoric, not as sophistry but as an art of informed argument on contingent matters, so the mere fact that Newman sought to persuade may be itself no argument as to the quality of the rhetoric he produced. Admirers of Newman hear in his writings notes of moral and religious truth, and have claimed to have found there intellectual riches to last more than a season. Indeed, nearly a hundred years after his death Newman speaks cor ad cor to increasing numbers. Among commentators, however, it is still something of an issue whether or to what BOOK REVIEWS 788 extent critics like Kingsley were correct: even i£ Newman was sincere enough in practice (which is not always conceded), the question remains whether his theory of reason skeptically undermines the enterprise of philosophy. This question, and others connected with it, provide the leitmotif for Professor Newman's book. Like others before him (e.g., Pailin, Price, Boekraad, Cronin, D'Arcy, Zeno, Juergens), Jay Newman seeks to understand and assess Newman's theory of belief as set forth in the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), but unlike them he undertakes " to provide an analytical philosophical criticism " (p. 202), that is, a chapter-by-chapter examination of the Grammar alone, "using only the logical tools of the analytical philosopher" (p. 7). Despite its title, then, this work is not designed to have the sweep that a Vargish or Sillem offers of Newman's "mental philosophy," nor in any way to serve as an introductory survey of Newman's work. And though there are disadvantages to reading the Grammar apart from Newman's work as a whole, students of Newman's thought will find here a clearly-written, careful, and above all provocative discussion which will occasion new reflections on Newman 's treatment of enduring philosophical problems. What I perceive to be serious problems with this study-of method, argument, and interpretation -considerably tempers my enthusiasm (these problems I will mention after a description of the book's contents). But it is to be hoped that the serious student of Newman's work will weigh these difficulties against the real gains that Professor Newman offers. Chapter One, "Newman's Philosophical Proj.ect," is a polemical introduction to Newman the man and to the Grammar. Its general effect is to...

This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature. Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’ Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use.

Marking a return of literary study from the remote reaches of abstraction to the realm of the immediate, the particular, and the real in which language and literature truly live, the essays in this volume articulate a productive, new critical approach: ordinary language criticism. With roots in the ordinary language philosophy derived especially from Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century, and in the ideas of American pragmatic philosophy propounded and extended by Stanley Cavell, this approach seeks to return criticism to its grounds in the natural language we all speak; to expose the terms of our engagement with narratives, arguments, and concepts-what Wittgenstein and Cavell call the "criteria" of our writing and reading. Resisting master formulations and overarching theories, _Ordinary Language Criticism_ does not so much dismiss the excitement of the last two decades of literary theorizing as it reminds us of the excitement of the shared common enterprises to which theory may still contribute. In this, the volume and the model it offers have wide implications for the academy, in which a widespread ersatz-sophistication has shorted the circuit between literary works and the real lives of those reading and teaching them. With a definitive introduction by editors Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, and elaborations and practical examples by major figures such as Cavell himself, Martha Nussbaum, Marjorie Perloff, Anthony Cascardi, and Charles Altieri, among others, this volume clearly shows and explains how ordinary language criticism differs from current trends and what it exactly it can accomplish in theory and practice. These essays prove that by attending more faithfully to what we actually do when we read, we can make reading more productive--can reveal how extraordinary and rich, how really sophisticated, the ordinary actually is.