Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory

by Cook, Patricia; Allan, George (CON); Verene, Donald Phillip (CON); MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822313229
• ISBN10: 0822313227
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-05-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Does philosophy have a future? Postmodern thought, with its rejection of claims to absolute truth or moral objectivity, would seem to put the philosophical enterprise in jeopardy. In this volume some of today's most influential thinkers face the question of philosophy's future and find an answer in its past. Their efforts show how historical traditions are currently being appropriated by philosophy, how some of the most provocative questions confronted by philosophers are given their impetus and direction by cultural memory. Unlike analytic philosophy, a discipline supposedly liberated from any manifestation of cultural memory, the movement represented by these essays demonstrates how the inquiries, narratives, traditions, and events of our cultural past can mediate some of the most interesting exercises of the present-day philosophical imagination. Attesting to the power of historical tradition to enhance and redirect the prospects of philosophy these essays exemplify a new mode of doing philosophy. The product of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in 1990, it is the task of this book to show that history can be reclaimed by philosophy and resurrected in postmodernity.Contributors. George Allan, Eva T. H. Brann, Arthur C. Danto, Lynn S. Joy, George L. Kline, George R. Lucas, Jr., Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert C. Neville, John Rickard, Stanley Rosen, J. B. Scheenwind, Donald Phillip Verene

Table of Contents

Acknowledgment

Introduction

Philosophy and Cultural Memory

Traditions and Transitions

Two Sources of Philosophical Memory: Vico Versus Hegel

Philosophical Imagination and the History of Philosophy

Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble? The Relevance of System and History

Modern Moral Philosophy: From Beginning to End?

Refutation, Narrative, and Engagement: Three Conceptions of the History of Philosophy

Perspectives on the Significance of Cultural Memory

The Shape of Artistic Pasts: East and West

Humanism and the Problem of Traditions in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy

The Symbiotic Relation of Philosophy and Theology

Cultural Memory and Textual Interpretation

The Six Silences of a Grecian Urn

Changing Russian Assessments of Spinoza and Their German Sources, 1796-1862

Tradition and Intertextual Memory in James Joyce's Ulysses

Plato's Quarrel with the Poets

Selected Bibliography

Index

Contributors

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