1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910809954603321

Autore

Borradori Giovanna

Titolo

The American Philosopher : Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn / / Giovanna Borradori

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2008]

©1994

ISBN

0-226-06649-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (192 p.)

Altri autori (Persone)

CrocittoRosanna

Disciplina

191

Soggetti

Philosophy, American - Interviews - 20th century - United States

Philosophers

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface to the English Edition -- Preface -- The Atlantic Wall -- 1. Twentieth-Century Logic: Willard Van Oman Quine -- 2. Post-Analytic Visions: Donald Davidson -- 3. Between the New Left and Judaism: Hilary Putnam -- 4. Anarchy at Harvard: Robert Nozick -- 5. The Cosmopolitan Alphabet of Art: Arthur C. Danto -- 6. After Philosophy, Democracy: Richard Rorty -- 7. An Apology for Skepticism: Stanley Cavell -- 8. Nietzsche or Aristotle? Alasdair MacIntyre -- 9. Paradigms of Scientific Evolution: Thomas S. Kuhn -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's The American Scholar, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the



late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930's, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy.