 | |
| Author | John Lysaker |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | philosophy of literature |
| Published | 2018 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 193 |
| ISBN | 9780226815855 |
Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought is a 2018 book by John Lysaker in which the author tries to show that philosophical thought is a praxis bound up with writing. [1]
Lysaker's first argument is that writing should be regarded as a praxis and not a techne, which opens it to the kind of deliberation Aristotle champions in his ethics. (And Lysaker argues that praxis better suits philosophical writing than style.) He then argues that deliberate writing should concern itself with at least three kinds of questions. First, how will a given genre and/or logical-rhetorical operation influence how one's thought unfolds? The question arises because philosophical writing does more than report results. It is a process of discovery in its own right, and the process unfolds differently in the aphorism than it does in the essay, and differently through irony than through the counter-example. (Along the way, Lysaker argues against strong form-content distinctions, claiming that each influences the other.) After considering the ways in which various genres and logical-rhetorical operations influence how thought unfolds (with an extended section on irony), Lysaker turns to a second question he finds essential to deliberate writing. What kind of relationship does a given genre and/or logical-rhetorical operation establish with regard to addressees? As with thought's self-relation, different genres and logical-rhetorical operations prompt and solicit different responses from readers, a point Lysaker argues in various contexts, including the polemic and the professional article, and with regard to the elusive phenomenon of voice.
Thinking, text, and reader meet in various historical contexts, and thus deliberate writing must ask: how will these acts, namely, genres and logical rhetorical operations, play in one's historical moment? Is the footnote elitist or an essential reminder that insights are indebted to others, have histories, and are almost never contested? How might aphorisms function in a period of commodified thought and anti-intellectualism? In developing this point, Lysaker stages extended encounters with W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and Walter Benjamin's One Way Street in order to explore books that strove to be "equal to their moments," to use Benjamin's phrase. What does this mean as an aspiration for writing? And how we might gauge the relative success or failure of a venture?
Lysaker's final argument is that texts can be written (or read) as wholes if one gathers how they relate to thought's unfolding, their addressees, and their historical moment. When read (or written) in this manner, a text images philosophy. More particularly, it exemplifies a way in which philosophy can inhabit and contest the histories to which it belongs and to which it inevitably contributes. A text is thus something like a character in a discursive and material polis, exemplifying a certain way of life. [2]
The book was reviewed by Jeffrey A. Bernstein (College of the Holy Cross) [3] and John Kaag (University of Massachusetts Lowell). [4] It also received short reviews from Eddie Glaude (Princeton University), Edward S. Casey (SUNY Stony Brook) and Eduardo Mendieta (Pennsylvania State University). [5]
An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.
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A sophist was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught arete, "virtue" or "excellence", predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
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Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, the Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and as a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
Josiah Royce was an American Pragmatist and objective idealist philosopher and the founder of American idealism. His philosophical ideas included his joining of pragmatism and idealism, his philosophy of loyalty, and his defense of absolutism.
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Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays is a book by Canadian literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye that attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature. Frye consciously omits all specific and practical criticism, instead offering classically inspired theories of modes, symbols, myths and genres, in what he termed "an interconnected group of suggestions." The literary approach proposed by Frye in Anatomy was highly influential in the decades before deconstructivist criticism and other expressions of postmodernism came to prominence in American academia circa 1980s.
Aristotle's Rhetoric is an ancient Greek treatise on the art of persuasion, dating from the 4th century BCE. The English title varies: typically it is Rhetoric, the Art of Rhetoric, On Rhetoric, or a Treatise on Rhetoric.
Aristotle first used the term ethics to name a field of study developed by his predecessors Socrates and Plato which is devoted to the attempt to provide a rational response to the question of how humans should best live. Aristotle regarded ethics and politics as two related but separate fields of study, since ethics examines the good of the individual, while politics examines the good of the city-state, which he considered to be the best type of community.
Owing to its origin in ancient Greece and Rome, English rhetorical theory frequently employs Greek and Latin words as terms of art. This page explains commonly used rhetorical terms in alphabetical order. The brief definitions here are intended to serve as a quick reference rather than an in-depth discussion. For more information, click the terms.
Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged after a number of similarly oriented topics of research and discussion during the late 20th century, including the sociology of scientific knowledge, history of science, and philosophy of science, but it is practiced most typically by rhetoricians in academic departments of English, speech, and communication.
In philosophy—more specifically, in its sub-fields semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics—meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify".
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Buddhist logico-epistemology is a term used in Western scholarship to describe Buddhist systems of pramāṇa and hetu-vidya. While the term may refer to various Buddhist systems and views on reasoning and epistemology, it is most often used to refer to the work of the "Epistemological school", i.e. the school of Dignaga and Dharmakirti which developed from the 5th through 7th centuries and remained the main system of Buddhist reasoning until the decline of Buddhism in India.
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Irony, in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected. It typically figures as a rhetorical device and literary technique. In some philosophical contexts, however, it takes on a larger significance as an entire way of life.
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy that existed through the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century until after the Renaissance in the 13th and 14th centuries. Medieval philosophy, understood as a project of independent philosophical inquiry, began in Baghdad, in the middle of the 8th century, and in France and Germany, in the itinerant court of Charlemagne in Aachen, in the last quarter of the 8th century. It is defined partly by the process of rediscovering the ancient culture developed in Greece and Rome during the Classical period, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate sacred doctrine with secular learning. This is one of the defining characteristics in this time period. Understanding God was the focal point of study of the philosophers at that time, Muslim and Christian alike.
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India has a long tradition of rhetoric about politics, philosophy, and religion, starting from ancient times.
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