Memory, of course, is not a trivial or isolated act, and therefore truth or falsity in descriptions of memory will have consequences for large reaches of our philosophical theory. Memory at least purports to give us our only direct knowledge of the past. And our only indirect knowledge of the past, through inference, must credit some memories somewhere. If then our knowledge of the past is vitiated, what remains of our knowledge of the present, or our expectations for the future? (...) But if memory lives up to its pretentions of acquainting us with the past, then what sort of world is it where an existent mind now can become directly acquainted with what is no more existent, but passed away? What in other words, are the ontological presuppositions of the act of memory? (shrink)

An examination of late Rorty shows that he does not abandon belief in an external world about which we can, and indeed must, acquire knowledge. His disapproval of the correspondence theory of truth does not involve the idea that anything other than local weather, for example, could falsify remarks about local weather. It is just that once we get done looking out the window or, if we are outside, feeling the right kind of drops make contact with our skin, there (...) is nothing else we can do, nothing better, to make ourselves more certain, more cognitively secure. One can see this in the detailed work that enables scientific progress. Science improves itself by doing more of the same. G. E. Moore's famous open question stays open only as a reminder that our fallibility never disappears and that our cognitive security is never better than pro tem. Rorty, as a faithful pragmatist and undogmatic meliorist, thinks this is perfectly O.K. (shrink)

Heidegger, Sartre and the later existentialist philosophers inherited a world, it has been said, from which "God is absent". Contemporary philosophy begins in the momentous questioning of the Christian experience by such nineteenth-century figures as Nietzsche and Dosteyevsky. But if existentialism is in some respects a beginning-again, it is in other respects linked to the classical world out of which Christianity arose and to certain themes in the writings of ancient and medieval Christians. Renewal and innovation converge. Addressing themselves to (...) the general reader, the three author-philosophers consider both the contemporary and the perennial. [Book jacket]. (shrink)

Heidegger, Sartre and the later existentialist philosophers inherited a world, it has been said, from which "God is absent". Contemporary philosophy begins in the momentous questioning of the Christian experience by such nineteenth-century figures as Nietzsche and Dosteyevsky. But if existentialism is in some respects a beginning-again, it is in other respects linked to the classical world out of which Christianity arose and to certain themes in the writings of ancient and medieval Christians. Renewal and innovation converge. Addressing themselves to (...) the general reader, the three author-philosophers consider both the contemporary and the perennial. [Book jacket]. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 263-272, Fall 2021.

Epicurus, though popularly and indeed nominally associated with a doctrine advocating the procurement of rather expensive pleasure, lived very simply in his garden with a circle of friends. The 14th of his Sovran Maxims or Cardinal Tenets , as collected by Diogenes Laertius, reads: ‘When tolerable security against our fellowmen is attained, then on a basis of power sufficient to afford support and of material prosperity arises in most genuine form the security of a quiet private life withdrawn from the (...) multitude’ R. D. Hicks, the translator, gives, as an alternative to ‘power sufficient to afford support’, ‘power to expel’, but on either reading, we are to think of Epicurus's garden, both the real place and the conceptualized, or tropologized, topos of wisdom and earthly felicity, as enclosed and exclusive. This enclosure, exclusivity, and—what is also implied—abstention of its inmates from participation in the affairs of state are given apophthegmatic expression in ‘Live hidden!’ We contemplate this adage, or slogan, from an enormous cultural distance and, for most of us, ‘Live hidden!’ is much more likely to trigger secondary reflections about the relations between ethics and politics, private and public, perfection of self and improvement of the world, than it is to constitute an actual, or potential, piece of advice we might think about whether , and how , to follow. (shrink)

A noted professor at Northwestern University provides new insights into God, creation, the world, and human emotion.

On the other hand nothing could be more evident than that we have very few such fully explicit objects before our minds. It would be a fine point in metaphysics to determine whether any objects are fully explicit, so clear and distinct that there is nothing more to them than what appears, and, if there are any such objects, which ones they are. Obviously most of the things we know hover between clarity and obscurity; we know something of them, but (...) often only enough to know that there is much more to know. The problem of knowledge then for an existing mind consists not so much in reflecting upon what it does know and rejoicing in its clarity, as it does in making what it knows vaguely or implicitly as clear and explicit as the occasion requires. Theory of knowledge therefore must locate itself in the chiaroscuro of our actual situation. (shrink)

A philosophical consideration of political affairs has the disadvantage of being incapable, in and of itself, of implying any specific practical action or policy. It would, then, seem useless except for the accompanying reflection that specific policy undertaken without any attention to principles, is mindless; and mindless action can have no expectation either of practical effect or of intellectual defense. No doubt the relation of principles to action is complex indeed; but at least it can be said that practical principles (...) without reference to possible action are vacuous, and action which can not be clarified by principle is aimless commotion. Principled action offers us then the best that can be hoped for. That, however, is the work not of philosophy but of statesmanship, a faculty which is as theoretically clear as it need be but also skilled by experience in reading the existing political scene. Accordingly my present remarks aim only at some principles involved in the understanding of war, focusing on those which seem conspicuously absent in contemporary discussion, and not at defending any specific judgments about the current war. Examples of incoherent principles will be drawn from present discussions; but any other war might have served equally well. No judgment about the present war can be derived from these remarks on principles; and if most of the false principles are quoted from the antiwar side, it is only because that side has been more vocal. (shrink)