Richard Rorty once suggested that, following a rigorous process of auto-critique, analytical philosophy attained coherence at a stylistic level, rather than being co-terminus with philosophy as such. Rorty’s subsequent reassurance that this was no bad thing, since the analytical style was, after all, a good style, seems less than reassuring, in part because of the philosophical resistance to style. Stanley Cavell—a philosopher certainly possessed of a distinctive style—has drawn attention to the tension, within philosophy, between the stylisation of and responsiveness (...) to experience. Taking Rorty’s and Cavell’s reflections as a starting point, this paper considers the status of George Santayana’s philosophy in relation to overlapping questions concerning style: prose style within philosophy, styles of philosophy, and philosophy as a style. Santayana’s poetic materialism and modest meta-philosophical premises make style central to his work in ways that anticipate the questions raised by Rorty and Cavell. (shrink)

Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell are both preoccupied with questions of contingency: whether conventions are ‘merely’ conventional, what kind of foothold they might provide, how to step away from convention, how to make convention one’s own. Not that the work of either philosopher could be described as conventional. Neither produced the philosophical equivalent of the ‘hackwork’ characterizing Thomas Kuhn’s ‘normal science’. Both philosophers invoke traditional philosophical argumentation, but do so only to depart from its terms. To some disciplinary sensibilities, both (...) might seem to indulge in meta-philosophy, talking about philosophy rather than doing it. Both thinkers would reject this... (shrink)