Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T14:20:59.863Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Philosophical Prose and Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Richard C. McCleary
Affiliation:
Old Dominion University

Extract

Ever since Plato took it out of public places and made it academic, Western philosophy has been the work of theorists: people whose leisure and culture leave them free to stand back from history and look on as spectators. Traditionally, Western philosophers have tried to build their theories on suprahistorical foundations. With the American and French revolutions, history and historical consciousness become essential elements of philosophy, but its suprahistorical foundations remain. Hegel's theory completes all prior philosophical theories by showing how they progressively embody history's transcendent reality. Marx makes Hegelian idealism stand up: it becomes the historically contingent theory of revolutionary practice. Yet Marxian philosophy is haunted by a spectre of its own historical inevitability that subsequent Marxists have characteristically invoked to legitimate their contingent practice.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. xxxviiixxxixGoogle Scholar; and Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60, 97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid., 73–74.

3 Ibid., 45.

4 Ibid., 57.

5 Ibid., 59.

6 Ibid., 53–54.

7 Ibid., 83.

8 Ibid., 84.

9 Ibid., 83.

10 Ibid., 60–61.

11 Ibid., 85–94.

12 Ibid., 63.

13 Ibid., 22.

14 Ibid., 77.

15 Ibid., 44.

16 Ibid., 80.

17 Ibid., 53–54.

18 Ibid., 63.

19 Ibid., 52–54.

20 Ibid., 44.

21 Ibid., 77.

22 Ibid., 60.

23 Ibid., 36–37.

24 Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 289.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 283.

26 Ibid., 108

27 MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘Philosophy, the “Other” Disciplines, and their His tories: A Rejoinder to Richard Rorty’, Soundings (1981), 135.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 133.

31 Ibid., 131

33 Ibid., 142

34 Ibid., 131.

35 Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, nos. 5–6 (1975), 109156Google Scholar. Boschetti, Anna, The Intellectual Enterprise, Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, McCleary, Richard C., trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

36 Bourdieu, Pierre, Ce que parler veut dire (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1982)Google Scholar, Chapter 1, Part III, ‘Censure et mise en forme’.

37 Bourdieu, Pierre, Choses dites (Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1987), pp. 112116.Google Scholar

38 Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Espace social et gènese des “classes”’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (1984).Google Scholar

39 Bourdieu, Pierre, Le Sens Pratique (Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1980), pp. 4950.Google Scholar

40 Gould, Stephen Jay, op. cit., 16.Google Scholar

41 Martha Nussbaum, review of Bloom's, AlanThe Closing of the American Mind, New York Review of Books (11 5, 1987).Google Scholar