Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (Carthage Reprint) - Softcover

Rosen, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587315009 ISBN 13: 9781587315008

Publisher: St. Augustines Press, 2004

Synopsis

In this 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.

About this title

Review

For Stanley Rosen, "philosophy must begin with a careful consideration of ordinary or everyday life as the context within which occur the dislocation and problems that demand extraordinary theoretical and analytical measures." Without that grounding in the everyday, or an ability to have its general principles expressed in ordinary language, philosophy becomes a set of "arbitrary rhetorical assertions" of which evaluation is impossible. Rosen explores this and related themes in several of the essays here; he also does a solid job of restating the positions of the ancients and the moderns in contemporary language, addressing such awkward problems as whether the pursuit of reason really does lead to happiness. Rosen is no popularizer, though, so a background in the history of philosophy, particularly but not limited to the ancient Greeks, will come in handy here.

About the Author

Stanley Rosen is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He is also the author of The Ancients and the Moderns, Plato’s Sophist, Plato’s Statesman, Plato’s Symposium, and The Question of Being, all published by Yale University Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1587315009
• ISBN 13: 9781587315008
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302