Abstract

"Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas," wrote Kierkegaard, "our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale." The life of reasoned evaluation, he said, is being sold "dirt cheap." Everyone wants "to go further." So also argues Nicholas Rescher in The Validity of Values, the second volume of A System of Pragmatic Idealism. Like Kierkegaard, Rescher sees the theory and practice of rational evaluation being put "on sale." He finds influences similar to those seen by Kierkegaard at work behind the sale's scene: a pervasive prudential, marketplace mentality; a philosophical vogue, cultivated by what Rescher calls our "civilized sophisticates", in which the normative role of reason is disdained.