Irigaray and Le Dœuff diagnose the problem of woman and philosophy in terms of love. The differing solutions to the problem can be found in their styles. Irigaray's style is loving and dialogic, transforming the inherent structure of love and reminding us of the traditional feminine position defined by men. Le Dœuff's style is critical and pluralistic and relates to her perception of the feminine way of philosophical writing. These styles take into account the undervaluation of the (...) feminine in the apparently `neutral' practices of philosophizing and surpass the traditional or unreflected notions of the feminine style. Ultimately, the consciously `subjective' styles, with the inherent aims of self-reflectivity and openness for other persons and texts, prove necessary when striving for truth and objectivity. Thus, Le Dœuff and Irigaray question the standard notion of philosophical style as neutral `non-style'. (shrink)

Originally published: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954. With new introd.

The present paper deals with the philosophical styles of the hermeneutic project and deconstruction and tries to answer the question whether there really is, as Derrida argues, a fundamental difference, even an opposition between them. In this sense, taking the questions Derrida addressed Gadamer in their famous Paris encounter in 1981 as a clue, the author retraces the fundamental articulations of deconstruction, descending from Derrida's own description of the idea to his actual deconstructive practice, and shows that the presupposition (...) Derrida takes as separating the hermeneutic project from deconstruction is actually one these two share in common. (shrink)

The paper offers an analysis of reversibility, a stylistic strategy philosophers employ when solving theoretical dilemmas. Reversibility means oscillating of a philosopher between two contradictory truths or dogmas. First, the adherent of reversibility faces two contradictory truths or dogmas. What follows is a rejection or an acceptance of both poles. In contrast to the style of the authors using the principle of reversibility, the paper describes a specific stylistic strategy preferred by dogmatic philosophers, one marked by moderate modality and (...) certainty of epistemological assertions. But one group of dogmatists also employ a specific kind of reversibility: the new, “original” and “controversial” theory is always postulated in direct opposition to the prevailing doctrine of the day. Regardless to the anti-dogmatic ethos of our times, the comparison of the two strategies shows, that the strategy of dogmatic authors is “more successful” than writing which avoids an unambiguous standpoint. (shrink)

After describing some of the ways in which pragmatist philosophers have employed different views about how to do philosophy, this paper explains how their different philosophical goals determine how they actually do philosoophy. We explain and discuss two aspects of Peirce’s work that are relevant to the ways in which he does philosophy: his remarks about the use of “literary prose” in philosophy and his valuable discussion of the “ethics of notation.” This is grounded in view of how (...) class='Hi'>philosophical writing should be carried out. We then discuss Peirce’s reasons for revising the model of representation that he adopted: he began by formulating philosophical issues about representation in terms of belief, but changed to give a central role to, first, judgment and, then, assertion. The paper concludes by discussing how these developments affected the development of his pragmatism. (shrink)

philosophers have been largely indifferent to questions about their own means of expression. It is as though they had tacitly established a distinc- tion between form and matter, and had also asserted an order of priority between them: the "matter" was what they would deal with-the form of its expression being an accidental feature of the acts of conception and communication. To be sure, there is a method, or at least a dogma, behind this inclination.

What are the relations, if any, between philosophy and literary style? Lang asserts "that the 'literariness' of philosophical writing is not accidental or ornamental but unavoidable--imbedded in that discourse and so also in its substantive questions and proposed solutions". Lang attempts to clarify and support his thesis in discussions of philosophy as literature and philosophy of literature.

Some time in the 1950’s I was invited to address a meeting of the English Institute which took place at Columbia University and, while I have but a dim recollection of the topic, a point came up in the discussion which I still remember very well and it bears very closely on the subject of this essay. I had said something in my opening remarks about how technical recent philosophy had become and what a formidable language was growing up around (...) it. In the audience was Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the distinguished literary scholar and author of, among others, that delightful book about science and literature, Newton Demands the Muse. She took the occasion to tell us that in her student days she could read and profit from philosophical works—Locke, Bergson, James—and went on to say that in her opinion any intelligent person could read these authors and others without having, as we would now say, “majored” in philosophy. She added, however, that she found herself no longer able to read with much comprehension the writing of the philosophers of the time because of the remoteness of the issues from concrete experience and the esoteric language in which they were presented. What Nicholson was perceiving, perhaps without knowing the background, was the about-face in philosophy that was taking place at the time. Largely in response to the charge that philosophy, unlike science, was making no “progress,” many philosophers decided to limit philosophy to areas—logic, semantics, semiotics—in which it was believed that progress was possible. One result was the abandoning of all the undeniably vague and stubborn issues—God, the self, freedom and determinism, values and facts and the like —that resist solutions of a scientific sort. Unfortunately for philosophers, these are the matters that interest everyone most. (shrink)

After describing some of the ways in which pragmatist philosophers have employed different views about how to do philosophy, this paper explains how their different philosophical goals determine how they actually do philosoophy. We explain and discuss two aspects of Peirce’s work that are relevant to the ways in which he does philosophy: his remarks about the use of “literary prose” in philosophy and his valuable discussion of the “ethics of notation.” This is grounded in view of how (...) class='Hi'>philosophical writing should be carried out. We then discuss Peirce’s reasons for revising the model of representation that he adopted: he began by formulating philosophical issues about representation in terms of belief, but changed to give a central role to, first, judgment and, then, assertion. The paper concludes by discussing how these developments affected the development of his pragmatism. (shrink)

Some time in the 1950’s I was invited to address a meeting of the English Institute which took place at Columbia University and, while I have but a dim recollection of the topic, a point came up in the discussion which I still remember very well and it bears very closely on the subject of this essay. I had said something in my opening remarks about how technical recent philosophy had become and what a formidable language was growing up around (...) it. In the audience was Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the distinguished literary scholar and author of, among others, that delightful book about science and literature, Newton Demands the Muse. She took the occasion to tell us that in her student days she could read and profit from philosophical works—Locke, Bergson, James—and went on to say that in her opinion any intelligent person could read these authors and others without having, as we would now say, “majored” in philosophy. She added, however, that she found herself no longer able to read with much comprehension the writing of the philosophers of the time because of the remoteness of the issues from concrete experience and the esoteric language in which they were presented. What Nicholson was perceiving, perhaps without knowing the background, was the about-face in philosophy that was taking place at the time. Largely in response to the charge that philosophy, unlike science, was making no “progress,” many philosophers decided to limit philosophy to areas—logic, semantics, semiotics—in which it was believed that progress was possible. One result was the abandoning of all the undeniably vague and stubborn issues—God, the self, freedom and determinism, values and facts and the like —that resist solutions of a scientific sort. Unfortunately for philosophers, these are the matters that interest everyone most. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction New Beginnings, or Continuity? Contrasting Readings of the Republic Plato and his Audience, Plato and Socrates.

The Issue of Abortion in America is an interactive multi-media CD-ROM created by the award winning Carnegie Mellon team that brought us A Right to Die?: The Dax Cowart Case. In this ground breaking CD-ROM, The Issue of Abortion in America gives users an opportunity to see and hear women and couples speak of the emotional struggles and moral dilemmas they face in their consideration of continuing or terminating a pregnancy. It also places the issue of abortion in the larger (...) social context of medical, legal, philosophical, and religious considerations. The information on the CD is presented in three student friendly sections: * Introduction: offers an introduction to the project as well as an overview of the program. * Case Histories: a set of interactive multimedia modules present situations in which women and couples describe their decisions to continue or terminate a pregnancy. * Resources: Reviews the background context that informs the discussion of the issue of abortion in America along with a summary section of the case histories. (shrink)

This paper engages with a central question posed by R. G. Collingwood: “[does] philosophical literature [have] any peculiarities corresponding to those of the thought which it tries to express?” In attempts to identify and distinguish between various schools and traditions of philosophy the idea of style is often invoked. And yet this same idea remains ill-defined and nebulous. My paper draws on a number of scattered discussions of style in philosophy in order to find the beginnings of (...) an answer to Collingwood’s question. I distinguish between “shallow” and “deep” conceptions of philosophical style and examine the various forms each takes. The shallow sense involves considerations of methodology, the dictates of prevailing fashions and choices in writing style, and deals primarily with the form that a philosophical text takes. The deep sense, in Whitehead’s words, engages with “the ultimate morality of the mind” and affects the actual content of writing. Here, a philosopher’s style invokes her fundamental philosophical commitments and reflects her philosophical persona and temperament. I maintain that a response to Collingwood’s question has to include both conceptions of style. (shrink)

This paper engages with a central question posed by R. G. Collingwood: “[does] philosophical literature [have] any peculiarities corresponding to those of the thought which it tries to express?” In attempts to identify and distinguish between various schools and traditions of philosophy the idea of style is often invoked. And yet this same idea remains ill-defined and nebulous. My paper draws on a number of scattered discussions of style in philosophy in order to find the beginnings of (...) an answer to Collingwood’s question. I distinguish between “shallow” and “deep” conceptions of philosophical style and examine the various forms each takes. The shallow sense involves considerations of methodology, the dictates of prevailing fashions and choices in writing style, and deals primarily with the form that a philosophical text takes. The deep sense, in Whitehead’s words, engages with “the ultimate morality of the mind” and affects the actual content of writing. Here, a philosopher’s style invokes her fundamental philosophical commitments and reflects her philosophical persona and temperament. I maintain that a response to Collingwood’s question has to include both conceptions of style. (shrink)

This paper briefly addresses John Smith’s criticisms of Brand Blanshard’s views on philosophical style. Blanshard elaborates these views in his On Philosophical Style, and Smith maintains that Blanshard is, “far too lenient on the reader” when it comes to the responsibility for understanding a text. In opposition to this leniency, Smith asks “what and how much is the reader expected to know about the subject of a work in order to understand it”, and later adds.

The article aims to present the study of Aristotle’s teaching on consciousness and soul conducted by the well-known contemporary scholar of ancient philosophy, Jonathan Barnes, as an example of a certain historical-philosophical style that emerged within British analytic philosophy as a whole and within the Aristotelian Society in particular during 1970-1980s. It is shown that the development of the historical-philosophical style within the Aristotelian Society at this time continues the tradition of slow reception of ideas from (...) continental philosophy, which was noted already in the early period of Society emergence and development. This is explained by certain theoretical isolation that had developed by this time in British philosophy, which had its imprint on historical-philosophical studies and is expressed in the application of conceptual analysis and the inclusion of its results into the modern philosophical context. Although Barnes considers Aristotle’s teaching on consciousness and soul through the prism of contemporary versions of physicalism and dualism, the question of what role the Aristotelian teaching plays for them remains unanswered. The author puts forward the thesis that in this case, J. Barnes’s analysis of the Aristotelian problem of consciousness and soul appears less productive than the previously developed approaches in scholasticism and phenomenology in the continental history of philosophy. (shrink)

When speaking of the philosophical importance of James’s late style, critics and philosophers have taken two broad approaches. One route, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum, attributes this style to the sensitivity of the characters. The other, exemplified by Robert Pippin, attributes the writing’s complexity to the ambiguities of the moral codes during this period of history. In my reading, James’s texts address a more general problem of modernity, which is the flattening of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) by disengaged approaches (...) to both epistemology and morality, the reduction of the lifeworld to the environment (Umwelt). James’s works open an ontological dimension to the question of language and normativity, a question that modernity’s moral languages—whether based on deontology, utility, or virtue—fail to articulate. His texts interrogate what normativity is rather than just portraying the sensitivity of the characters or uncertainty of the historical moment, although both of those readings are certainly justified. (shrink)

Vient ensuite une approche du style des philosophes dans son rapport à la construction même d'un système argumentatif autant qu'à divers modes d'expression : langage et littérarité donc, afin de sonder les voies de la création chez ...

Historians and philosophers of science have furnished a wide array of theoretical-historiographical terms to emphasize the discontinuities among different systems of knowledge. Some of the most famous include Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm”, Michel Foucault’s “episteme”, and the notion of “styles of reasoning” more recently developed by Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson. This paper takes up this theoretical-historiographical thread by assessing the values and limitations of the notion of “style” for the historical and philosophical study of science. Specifically, reflecting on (...) various methodological and theoretical concerns prompted by sexuality, translation, and East Asian studies, this paper argues that the heretofore ways in which historians and philosophers of science have used the notion of “style” are severely restricted in terms of its mere applicability to the intellectual history of Western science. The particular example of the translation of “homosexuality” into Chinese during the May Fourth era reveals that the notion of “style” has the potential of carrying a much more dynamic conceptual weight, as when used in “styles of argumentation”. The paper also engages briefly with the historiography of scientific “national styles” and ends with some concluding remarks on the limitations of “social histories from below” and the under appreciated importance of “epistemological histories of possibilities”. (shrink)

One challenge involved in integrating so-called ‘non-Western’ philosophies into ‘Western’ philosophical discourse concerns the fact that non-Western philosophical texts frequently differ significantly in style and approach from Western ones, especially those in contemporary analytic philosophy. But how might one bring texts that are written, for example, in a literary, non-expository style, and which do not clearly advance philosophical positions or arguments, into constructive dialogue with those that do? Also, why might one seek to do this (...) in the first place? This paper addresses these questions by means of a case study involving the Daoist classic, theZhuangzi.L’un des défis posés par l’inclusion des soi-disant philosophies «non-occidentales» dans le discours de la philosophie «occidentale» a trait au fait que plusieurs textes philosophiques non-occidentaux diffèrent de façon significative, en termes de style et d’approche, des textes occidentaux, principalement ceux issus de la philosophie analytique contemporaine. Comment établir un dialogue constructif entre des textes écrits de façon littéraire, qui n’ont pas l’allure d’un exposé et qui n’avancent pas clairement des positions ou des arguments philosophiques et des textes qui, au contraire, prennent la forme d’un exposé avançant des positions ou des arguments? Pourquoi, de prime abord, voudrait-on ouvrir un tel dialogue? Cet article pose ces questions par le biais de l’étude du cas du classique taoïste, leZhuāngzǐ. (shrink)

In this article the questions of what counts as play and philosophy are considered in relation to the question of early education for young children. The child subject characterised by the themes of playfulness, emotion, and irrationality is compared to the playful philosopher emanating from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. This analysis contributes to the exploration of themes of truth and difference, the search for challenges to styles of philosophy in education, and to the role (...) of the educator in knowing and producing a particular creative child subject. Relationships between child and adult, player and philosopher are explored in order to question what counts as style, play and philosophy for both the child who is required to contribute as a creative player, and for the educator who is required to facilitate the development of such a child. The contemporary valorisation of children as active and constructive philosophers is, then, critically examined in terms of what counts as a philosopher and/or a child, and who gets to ‘do’ creative and playful philosophy. This article draws upon the New Zealand curriculum framework for early childhood education, Te Whāriki, and the work of Paulo Ghiraldelli, in exploring the contributions of both child and adult to the experience of education and philosophy. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe was one of the most gifted and productive philosophers of the decades following the Second World War. Her writings present challenges to readers: some of them are very difficult to comprehend while others seem philosophically-minded yet situated outside of philosophy as such. There are also the issues of whether she had a philosophical method and of the influence of Wittgenstein on the manner of her approach. A summary and estimate of Anscombe’s enduring contributions is presented before exploring (...) the style and aims of her philosophical work. Then two of her writings on religion are examined and their implications for her attitude to philosophy considered. (shrink)