Reviews the book, Relational being: Beyond self and community by Kenneth J. Gergen . The primary plea of the book is that psychology consider a relational rather than individual conception of its phenomena. Gergen encourages us to "treat what we take to be the individual units as derivative of relational process" . This notion of a fundamentally relational subject is one that the reader is invited to explore and to test against other, more traditional, ways of constructing being. It is (...) a proposition entertained and evaluated in terms of its implications but it is not presented as the real, true, or most factual account of human experience. Throughout the text, Gergen attempts to replace the individual or monological expositional style with a more dialogical, plural kind of textual negotiation. The book is constantly questioning and coming to terms with itself, its critics, and its limitations. The book is, as Bakhtin might have it, multivocal. Gergen invokes his own authorial voice, but also his voice as an embedded, historical being. Each chapter is peppered with anecdotes and personal reflections woven into the overall narrative as concrete counterpoint to the abstractions of theoretical argument. In the process, Gergen is surprisingly intimate, personal, and generous with his private life and history. The book also becomes something more human, narrative, and funny than is usual in theoretical exegesis. This style is quite inviting, partly because it is rooted in everyday life but also because it explicitly invites, and even voices, the critic, the question, and the doubt. Ultimately, what is compelling in the pages of Relational Being is what is fundamentally compelling about relationalism itself—namely, the way that it displaces abstract system as the core of meaning and replaces it with embodied relation. This displacement has the potential to redress some of the essential distortions at the heart of Enlightenment reason—particularly that venerable tradition of riding one’s chosen theoretical hobby horse into the face of concrete, lived experience . Relational practice moves us away from the distortions that inevitably come when we make everything we encounter instrumental to some idea that we cherish . Relational practice asks us, instead, to continually return to the lived relation and so continually rupture and remake the narratives by which we understand it. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

"[Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language.... The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."—Rudolf Arnheim, _Times Literary Supplement_.

Though almost entirely neglected today, Shadworth Hodgson was an important and respected philosophical figure in Britain during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. An early member of Sir James Knowles’ Metaphysical Society, he was a joint founder of the Aristotelian Society which followed it, and whose first President he was from 1880-94. He was also, in 1901, one of the founding fellows of the British Academy. This chapter examines his main philosophical position as set out in his magnum opus, (...) The Metaphysic of Experience. (shrink)

Responds to the reviews by K. O'Doherty and J. W. Clegg of the current author's book, Relational being: Beyond self and community . One of my chief reactions to the resistances represented in these reviews is that the volume failed to make clear a vision of how we might go on together in the academic world where different viewpoints dominate. To elaborate: both reviewers take issue with my relational account in terms of its seeming dismissal or eradication of cherished (...) concepts—including for Clegg, personal experience, genuine selfknowledge, and independent moral agency; and for O’Doherty, individual awareness, agency, and causality. In a certain sense their resistances are justified. My account raises critical concerns with such concepts, and in certain cases offers a radical reconceptualization. Both reviewers also suggest that these are questions of fundamental ontology, and offer arguments against what they see as my faulty foundations. However, as I tried to explain in the work, I approach theory development from a social constructionist perspective. This means replacing the traditional goal of the theorist to “tell the truth” about the world, with the attempt to generate an intelligibility that may foster different—and possibly more viable—forms of life. In effect, I am not attempting to articulate a final philosophy; I neither propose nor wish to argue ontology. From a constructionist perspective such arguments are futile; on what grounds other than those we construct could we settle such differences? Now to be fair, both Clegg and O’Doherty recognize this constructionist background, and my attempt to avoid eliminating alternative traditions or conceptions. However, this recognition does not deter them from returning to questions of fundamentals; they seem to want a knock-down conflict in which “justified true belief” will win out. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this concise volume, the author sets himself several tasks. He attempts to provide a general introduction to Nietzsche for educated readers, or for students in need of a reliable summary. Furthermore, he wishes to rescue Nietzsche from the distortions to which he has been subjected as a result of decades of controversy as well as the use and abuse of him by interested parties. Finally, he desires to depict the way Nietzsche "really was" in both his life and his (...) work. (shrink)

This collection, in the genre of a Festschrift presented in honor of Elizabeth G. Salmon by her colleagues at Fordham University, comprises twelve scholarly essays of uniform excellence, all of them original to this volume. They range rather broadly over the whole history of Western man’s grappling with the question of God—from Plato’s hesitancy to give ultimacy to the Forms to Dewey’s discerning a role for God in the search for human meaning. In between is Avicenna’s understanding of intellect, Descartes’ (...) Cogito, Hegel’s critique of Kant, Marcel’s intuition of being as mystery, the Transcendental Thomists: Rahner’s and Lonergan’s metaphysics of spirit and Maréchal’s argument for God, and Peirce’s neglected argument from Erkenntnislehre as instinct more basic than reasoning. Unification comes from the fact that these are all exercises in the philosophy of God, an activity viewed here as retaining a certain contiguity with theology and religious history. No one school of philosophical thought serves to unify the essays; nearly all are represented, with the exception of any explicit use of Process Thought or of the new natural theology believed to be deriving from Analytical Philosophy, beyond Flew and MacIntyre. (shrink)

There are fresh currents running through this volume, subtitled "An Essay on Truth," which dispel some accumulated but unexamined theories: e.g., that St. Paul took literally the three-story picture of the world; that nature can be subsumed under the category of history so that all meaning is historical; that there is a genuine dilemma between absolutism and relativism in morality. The author argues that the clue to reality is "story" for the simple reason that reality itself is story: a dramatic (...) conflict between persons, ambiguous at its core. The real then is grasped as story, rather than in terms of philosophical Weltanschauung, or scientific Weltbild, or history which in furnishing elements to the story distinguishes it from myth. Beyond emotive propositions, verbal propositions, and descriptive propositions lies a fourth kind of statement proper to story. Unfortunate oversimplifications compromise the book’s thesis: e.g. that Logos, Substance, and Life-Process are concepts whose use is metaphorical as is that of causality; that Aquinas taught grace is a supernatural substance; that Aristotle viewed reality as ideal rather than actual; that to conceive of evil as non-being is to deny it reality, to view it as illusory. At work here is a decided antipathy to the narrowings of rational discourse that rules out anything that might undergird the author’s "story" and give it ontological density. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley did not write extensively or systematically on the philosophy of religion, and much of what he did write has the character of either tentative speculation or the pre-emptive rebuttal of potential misinterpretations that might threaten his general philosophical position. ‘I admit that on this subject I never had much to say’ he warns. But such a remark should not discourage us from considering his views on this topic, since the disclaimer is typically Bradleian, and more reflective of (...) his high standards for what is required in order to claim to have something to say about some matter than of any genuine lack of opinion. On closer inspection we find that he has, scattered throughout his work, a great many important things to say about this subject. (shrink)

W. J. Mander presents the first ever synoptic history of British Idealism, the school of thought which dominated English-language philosophy from the 1860s to the early 20th century. He restores to its proper place this neglected period of philosophy, introducing the exponents of Idealism and explaining its distinctive concepts and doctrines.

W. J. Mander examines the nature of idealist ethics, that is to say, the form and content of ethical belief most typically adopted by philosophical idealists. His inquiry has two aims. The first is historical: from the record of past philosophy, Mander demonstrates that there exists a discernible idealist approach to moral philosophy; a tradition of 'idealist ethics', and examines its characteristic marks and varieties. The second aim is apologetic. He argues that such idealist ethics offers an attractive way of (...) looking at moral questions and that it has much to contribute to contemporary discussion. In particular he argues that Idealist ethics have the power to cut through the sterile opposition between moral realism and moral anti-realism. To be an idealist is precisely to hold that the universe is so constituted that things are real if and only if they are ideal; to hold that uncovering in something the work of mind makes it more not less significant. (shrink)