1972 1980 consequence essay pragmatism
Access options available:. Indeed, she concludes, "Autobiography can be said to model die interpretive activity that makes understanding possible and diat marks our common humanity" p. Some may object uiat such a formulation, feir from providing a distinctive uieory of autobiography, simply identifies it with the process of understanding in general and offers no criteria for distinguishing it from odier hermeneutical acts or literary genres. Gunn's claim, however, is not just uiat autobiography is an interpretive act among others, but diat it "models" such acts in the sense diat it provides a paradigm case of interpretation as well as "enacts" it. Autobiography could uius be said to be distinguished from other interpretive acts by its self-reflexive dramatization — or, as Paul de Man might put it, its allegory — of reading. While Gunn acknowledges that autobiography sometimes stresses die failures of selfunderstanding rather than its successes, in all the texts she examines Thoreau's Waiden, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Augustine's Confessions , and the American Indian narrative Black Elk Speaks the autobiographer is ultimately able to read his life as a coherent ifnot necessarily happy whole.
Consequences Of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980
Access options available:. Indeed, she concludes, "Autobiography can be said to model die interpretive activity that makes understanding possible and diat marks our common humanity" p. Some may object uiat such a formulation, feir from providing a distinctive uieory of autobiography, simply identifies it with the process of understanding in general and offers no criteria for distinguishing it from odier hermeneutical acts or literary genres.
Gunn's claim, however, is not just uiat autobiography is an interpretive act among others, but diat it "models" such acts in the sense diat it provides a paradigm case of interpretation as well as "enacts" it.
Autobiography could uius be said to be distinguished from other interpretive acts by its self-reflexive dramatization — or, as Paul de Man might put it, its allegory — of reading. While Gunn acknowledges that autobiography sometimes stresses die failures of selfunderstanding rather than its successes, in all the texts she examines Thoreau's Waiden, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Augustine's Confessions , and the American Indian narrative Black Elk Speaks the autobiographer is ultimately able to read his life as a coherent ifnot necessarily happy whole.
In this respect, they are all success stories, allegories of the possibility rather than the impossibility of reading. Similarly, her assertion that "true autobiography" is always narrative excludes from consideration non-narrative texts for instance, Montaigne's Essais, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, Michel Leiris's La regie dujeu, and to a certain extent, Nabokov's Speak, Memory which fragment and disperse the self and question the possibility of"understanding" it.
Gunn is, of course, entitled to her own definition, but one may feel that she stacks the deck in a way that allows her to avoid confronting some of the most important issues in the current debate. On the whole, Gunn succeeds in demonstrating the interest of bringing a hermeneutical perspective to bear on the problems of autobiographical writing.
While I find it hard to see in her book the "genuine breakthrough" Paul Ricoeur attributes to it in his dustjacket blurb, it is certainly a significant contribution to "the controversial theory of autobiography. After more than twenty years in the philosophy department at Princeton, Richard Rorty has moved to the English department at the University ofVirginia, as Kenan Professor of Humanities.
The change is significant in light ofhis recent work. In a essay which, with eleven others from the period , forms the contents of the volume under review , Rorty voiced his reservations about "Keeping Philosophy Pure," as a discipline with privileged access to questions about Truth, Goodness, and Rationality. Rorty set forth the broad bases for his diesis in Philosophy and the Minor ofNature Philosophy and its professional jargon do not have privileged access to the Language of Nature herselfbecause there is no such Language, euid hence no reason for Philosophy to try to find it.
Instead of professional Philosophy, it would be more honest to practice "philosophy," for Philosophy to dissolve itself into criticism; we would do better to concentrate our attention, in good pragmatist fashion, on "what works," and on describing how diings in die world "hang togedier," rather than on what is True. The contrast between knowledge as "correspondence to nonrepresentations" the "realist" view and knowledge as "coherence among representations" the "pragmatist" view sustains these essays throughout, but there is a more nagging tension between pragmatism and Philosophy than this contrast may suggest: that pragmatism, as a practice or a technique, tends to suppress reflective philosophical thought, in favor of seeking ways to cope with the world.
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Buy Consequences Of Pragmatism: Essays First edition by Richard Rorty (ISBN: ) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices. Rorty seeks to tie philosophy's past to its future by connecting what he sees as the positive (and neglected) contributions of the American pragmatic philosophers.
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Coming soon. Challenging the presupposition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Rorty suggests a new role for philosophy in contemporary culture. That said, what is remarkable about this book is its interest in history, in the disciplinary and institutional framework of contemporary thought, in 'continental' philosophy from Hegel to Foucault and Derrida.
Consequences of Pragmatism
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Consequences Of Pragmatism Philosophy Essays 1972-1980
This was a more difficult book to re-read than I imagined. Clearly, I had not understood much in my previous read. Chapters on Wittgenstein and Read full review. Richard McKay Rorty is the principal American voice of postmodern philosophy. After having taught philosophy at Princeton University for more than 20 years, Rorty became a university professor in humanities at the University of Virginia in He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. In Rorty published The Linguistic Turn, an anthology of twentieth-century philosophy that opens with his page introduction. This work has become a standard introduction to analytic philosophy, and its title names an era.
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Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980
This was a more difficult book to re-read than I imagined. Clearly, I had not understood much in my previous read. Chapters on Wittgenstein and Read full review. Richard McKay Rorty is the principal American voice of postmodern philosophy. After having taught philosophy at Princeton University for more than 20 years, Rorty became a university professor in humanities at the University of Virginia in He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. In Rorty published The Linguistic Turn, an anthology of twentieth-century philosophy that opens with his page introduction. This work has become a standard introduction to analytic philosophy, and its title names an era. Despite his early hope for the future of analytic philosophy, Rorty came to doubt its foundations. This doubt prodded him to master American pragmatism as well as continental European work in hermeneutics and deconstruction. This work, in turn, led Rorty to question the entire tradition of Western philosophy. These doubts are expressed in his second book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , which is one of the most widely discussed of all recent American works in philosophy. It announces the death of philosophy as a kind of higher knowledge but recommends its continuance as edification and as a branch of literature. Choice proved prophetic in stating that "this bold and provocative book is bound to rank among the most important of the decade.
