Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn
    The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn
    The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn
    Ebook177 pages3 hours

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

    By Giovanna Borradori

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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 1930s, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateApr 15, 2008
    ISBN9780226066493
    The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn
    Author

    Giovanna Borradori

    Giovanna Borradori is professor of philosophy and chair of philosophy at Vassar College. She specializes in European philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, her research has focused on the aesthetics of architecture and the philosophy of terrorism. She is the editor of Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1988) and the author of two books: The American Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2003), a “philosophy best-seller” translated in ten languages.

    Read more from Giovanna Borradori

    Related to The American Philosopher

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell

      Jun 21, 2018

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell
      4 min read

    • Article

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?

      May 28, 2019

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Mental Music

      Sep 1, 2021

      Mental Music
      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Big Picture

      May 26, 2022

      IBN KHALDUN (1332-1406) WAS A PIONEERING Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demo

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Making of Genius

      Nov 27, 2017

      The Making of Genius
      9 min read

    • Article

      Theories Of Conspiracy Theories

      Jun 16, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-History Ronald H Fritze Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 272pp, £20, ISBN 9781789145397 There has been growing interest in recent

      3 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Postmodern Books

      Nov 3, 2021

      In 1996 Andrew C Bulhak of Monash University created a computer program called the Postmodernism Generator, which automatically produces imitations of postmodernist writing. “It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically corr

      5 min read

    • Article

      2022 Books Of The Year

      Nov 24, 2022

      2022 Books Of The Year
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Hyper-local Parent Power Winning The Culture War In The American South

      Apr 1, 2022

      RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, IS ALMOST AN English town. A settlement older than the United States itself, it is perhaps the perfectly preserved symbol of the deep roots and common ties of its country with the greater Anglosphere; to use the former Senator and

      8 min read

    • Article

      Who Said Science and Art Were Two Cultures?

      Nov 17, 2021

      On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo

      8 min read

    • Article

      ARTS & CULTURE

      Jan 28, 2021

      ARTS & CULTURE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wisdom On The Bonfire

      Oct 29, 2020

      Wisdom On The Bonfire
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims

      May 11, 2023

      Hitler’s Forgotten Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      Errant Thought

      Mar 1, 2023

      If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Deconstructing The Decolonisers

      Jul 27, 2023

      TO DECOLONISE THE CURRICULUM or not to decolonise the curriculum, that is the question. In his latest book, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Doug Stokes turns his analytical eye for international affairs inward

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Broken Circle

      Dec 23, 2020

      THERE ARE FOUR AGES OF MODERN VIENNA. Before the First World War, it was cultured and rich; from 1918 until the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, it was cultured and poor; from 1938 to the end of the Allied occupation, it was just poor; and from 1955 to t

      11 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Mar 1, 2022

      Table Talk
      8 min read

    Reviews for The American Philosopher

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The American Philosopher - Giovanna Borradori

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1