Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy

by Bruns, Gerald L.

• ISBN13: 9780810116740
• ISBN10: 081011674X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-01
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers--have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, events over structures, inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi	(2)
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction Theory, Practice, Proximity: A Short History of the End of Philosophy	1	(20)
Part I: The Proximity of Language	21	(50)
Chapter 1 Loose Talk about Religion from William James	21	(20)
Chapter 2 Donald Davidson among the Outcasts	41	(16)
Chapter 3 Law and Language: Ronald Dworkin, Critical Legal Studies, and the Hermeneutics of the Legal Text	57	(14)
Part II: The Limits of Narrative	71	(62)
Chapter 4 Literature and the Limits of Moral Philosophy: Reflections on Alasdair Maclntyre's Project	71	(22)
Chapter 5 Along the Fatal Narrative Turn: A Cautionary Tale for Neurophilosophers and Other Eliminative Materiahsts	93	(14)
Chapter 6 Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Martha Nussbaum's Ethics of Particularity	107	(26)
Part III: Poetry and Philosophy inside the Everyday World	133	(86)
Chapter 7 "The Accomplishment of Inhabitation" : Danto, Cavell, and the Argument of American Poetry	133	(32)
Chapter 8 Wallace Stevens without Epistemology	165	(16)
Chapter 9 Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare	181	(18)
Chapter 10 The Last Romantic: Stanley Cavell and the Writing of Philosophy	199	(20)
Notes	219	(56)
Bibliography	275	(16)
Name Index	291	(6)
Subject Index	297