Robbins Library Notes

Via Bookforum.com:

• Susan Neiman, in The Globe & Mail (Canada) makes the case for why Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the 50 greatest books of all times in “Can and Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant: Susan Neiman Makes the Case.” It’s a neat look at why the First Critique is so important, and why it remains so central to the human project.
• From the journal Arion 15 (3) Winter 2008: Raymond Geuss remembers Richard Rorty.

At left: Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Richard Rorty was one of the most influential figures in American philosophy during the latter part of the twentieth century. As Bjørn Ramberg writes in the introduction to the entry on Rorty in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty

…developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty’s view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty’s critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty’s principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. … In [his] writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

(Those who are curious about Rorty should definitely the rest of Ramberg’s entry.)

I’m writing about Rorty today in light of two recent links on Bookforum.com. The first is an interview of Neil Gross by Scott McLemee in InsideHigherEd.com. Gross is the author of the soon-to-be published Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. The second link is an excerpt from the introduction of Gross’ book.

At left: Jean-Paul Sartre, 1964. (c) New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. o. NXP/PAR 1444833. United Press International photo.

What is the meaning of life? Here is a question that is commonly associated with philosophy and philosophical speculation.

A variety of answers have been given to this question — traditional answers like compassion, love, service, worship of God, a life according to right reason and/or nature, or establishing political and economic freedom will be familiar to many.

(There are also not-so-serious answers, such as “42,” in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the silliness of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.)

And yet, questions about the meaning of life have fallen out of favor with much of philosophy since the latter half of the twentieth century. Sartre, for example, claimed that there is no meaning other than that created by isolated individuals — humans are condemned to be free and construct their own meaning, without God or metaphysics to support them. Also, given the strong anti- and post-metaphysical stance taken by both analytic and Continental philosophy during this time, there is little wonder as to why the question of the meaning of life makes many uncomfortable. Many might indeed agree with Shakespeare:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, V, 5, 22-33

Nonetheless, in spite of all of what I’ve listed above, these questions about the meaning of life stubbornly persist. Michael Casey, in “The ultimate conversation stopper: does life have meaning?” looks at why the question bothers so many people. Casey also investigates the claim that life is meaningless — especially in the work of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty — showing that while helpful in certain ways, it is problematic and questionable, for a number of reasons.

A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.

If you ask, good reader, why I chose to write on this topic today, it is because I believe that philosophy can and should address questions about the meaning of life. I believe that philosophy should recover what John Haldane and others have called the “sapiential dimension” of philosophy. This does not mean that philosophers should be moralizers, or self-help gurus, or things of that sort. But it does mean that these perennial questions of meaning that every person must face in life fall well within the subject area of philosophical discourse and discussion, and philosophers should not shy away from these questions, or from trying to answer them.