Metaphysics in Ordinary Language

Description

In this rich collection of philosophical writings, Stanley Rosen addresses a wide range of topics—from eros, poetry, and freedom to problems like negation and the epistemological status of sense perception. Though diverse in subject, Rosen’s essays share two unifying principles: there can be no legitimate separation of textual hermeneutics from philosophical analysis, and philosophical investigation must be oriented in terms of everyday language and experience, although it cannot simply remain within these confines. Ordinary experience provides a minimal criterion for the assessment of extraordinary discourses, Rosen argues, and without such a criterion we would have no basis for evaluating conflicting discourses: philosophy would give way to poetry. Philosophical problems are not so deeply embedded in a specific historical context that they cannot be restated in terms as valid for us today as they were for those who formulated them, the author maintains. Rosen shows that the history of philosophy—a story of conflicting interpretations of human life and the structure of intelligibility—is a story that comes to life only when it is rethought in terms of the philosophical problems of our own personal and historical situation. Contents Preface Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Suspicion, Deception, and Concealment Chapter 2. The Lived Present Chapter 3. Erotic Ascent Chapter 4. The Golden Apple Chapter 5. The Problem of Sense Perception in Plato's Philebus Chapter 6. Forms, Elements, and Categories Chapter 7. Technē and the Origins of Modernity Chapter 8. Sad Reason Chapter 9. Transcendental Indeterminateness Chapter 10. Freedom and Reason Chapter 11. Interpretation and the Fusion of Horizons: Remarks on Gadamer Chapter 12. Is There a Sign of Freedom? Chapter 13. Philosophy and Ordinary Experience Chapter 14. Nothing and Dialectic Chapter 15. Kojève’s Paris: A Memoir Notes Index