Description
Book SynopsisOne of a pair of books selected from Stanley Rosen’s career as a philosopher, scholar, and teacher over the last half of a century. They represent both the vast range of his learning in the most important philosophers of the tradition and the daring and penetration of his exploration of the fundamental philosophical questions. Yet the essays are written with an accessibility that is an expression of Rosen’s thesis that our ordinary experience and speech provides the only stable ground for understanding and evaluating extraordinary thought and experiences.
Rosen proposes that only a qualified Platonism in which the preservation of the link between the good and the rational on the everyday level was preserved on the philosophical level, can do justice to our experience of ourselves. The notions of form and intuition play a central role in his proposal to preserve the spontaneity of the soul and the heterogeneity of its objects.
The essays were originally written for a variety of purposes: there are panoramic reviews of his philosophical intentions, intricate analyses of fundamental problems, challenging interpretations of classical texts, reviews of other authors, and informal commentaries on the state of philosophy in our time. Taken together these essays provide a key to the some of the most decisive questions in philosophy and a valuable explication of some the central themes of Rosen’s work.
The essays were selected from articles, chapters, and unpublished lectures that were composed over the last five decades. They are distributed into two volumes by their focus upon ancient and modern themes, a convenient division that is not meant to imply a doctrinal chasm. On the contrary, it is one of Rosen’s arguments that those who wish to preserve ancient wisdom are best served by the demonstration of the both parties address the same essential human nature, however much the practical and theoretical demands differ from epoch to epoch.
Table of Contents1. Are We Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On? Against Reductionism
2. Kant’s Doctrine of Perception
3. Kant on Happiness
4. Is There a Transition from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness?
5. Review of Alexandre Kojève,
Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie paienne, Tome 1:
Les Présocratiques 6. Negation and Dialectic
7. Is Thinking Spontaneous?
8. Contributions to “Contributions”
9. Freedom and Reason
10. Review of Steven Smith,
Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity
11. Paradigms of Philosophizing and the Future of Philosophy
12. Back to the Beginning: Comment on Catherine Zuckert,
Postmodern Platos 13. The Absence of Structure
14. Review of Carl Page,
Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy 15. Philosophy in an Age of Postmodernism
16. Being Unreasonable: Review of Richard Wolin,
The Seduction of Unreason. The Intellectual Romance with Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism 17. Postmodernism and the Possibility of Critical Thinking
18. Mind and Body in Nietzsche
19. Thoughts on the Universal Homogeneous State
20. The Identity of, and Difference between, Analytical and Continental Philosophy
21. Hegel and Historicism
22. Memory and Human Time
23. Human Temporality in Plato, Husserl, and Heidegger
24. Freedom and Spontaneity
25. Remarks on Amartya Sen
