Home / Books / Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory

Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory

Appropriating Historical Traditions

Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory cover image

Book

Pages: 258

Published: May 1993

Editor: Patricia Cook

Contributors: George Allan, Donald Phillip Verene, Alasdair MacIntyre, J. B. Schneewind, Lynn S. Joy, Robert Cummings Neville, Eva T. H. Brann, George Kline, John S. Rickard, and Stanley Rosen

Does philosophy have a future? Postmodern thought, with its rejection of claims to absolute truth or moral objectivity, would seem to put the philosophical enterprise in jeopardy. In this volume some of today's most influential thinkers face the question of philosophy's future and find an answer in its past. Their efforts show how historical traditions are currently being appropriated by philosophy, how some of the most provocative questions confronted by philosophers are given their impetus and direction by cultural memory.
Unlike analytic philosophy, a discipline supposedly liberated from any manifestation of cultural memory, the movement represented by these essays demonstrates how the inquiries, narratives, traditions, and events of our cultural past can mediate some of the most interesting exercises of the present-day philosophical imagination. Attesting to the power of historical tradition to enhance and redirect the prospects of philosophy these essays exemplify a new mode of doing philosophy.
The product of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in 1990, it is the task of this book to show that history can be reclaimed by philosophy and resurrected in postmodernity.

Contributors. George Allan, Eva T. H. Brann, Arthur C. Danto, Lynn S. Joy, George L. Kline, George R. Lucas, Jr., Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert C. Neville, John Rickard, Stanley Rosen, J. B. Scheenwind, Donald Phillip Verene

Buy

Availability: Loading...

Price: Loading...

Buy the e-book:

Request a desk or exam copy

Information

Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Acknowledgment vii

Introduction 1

Part I. Philosophy and Cultural Memory

Traditions and Transitions / George Allan 21

Two Sources of Philosophical Memory: Vico Versus Hegel / Donald Phillip Verene 40

Part II. Philosophical Imagination and the History of Philosophy

Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble? The Relevance of System and History / Alasdair MacIntyre 65

Modern Moral Philosophy: From Beginning to End? / J. B. Schneewind 83

Refutation, Narrative, and Engagement: Three Conceptions of the History of Philosophy / George R. Lucas, Jr. 104

Part III. Perspectives on the Significance of Cultural Memory

The Shape of Artistic Pasts: East and West / Arthur C. Danto 125

Humanism and the Problem of Traditions in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy / Lynn S. Joy 139

The Symbiotic Relation of Philosophy and Theology / Robert Cummings Neville 149

Part IV. Cultural Memory and Textual Interpretation

The Six Silences of a Grecian Urn / Eva T. H. Brann 167

Changing Russian Assessments of Spinoza and Their German Sources, 1796-1862 / George L. Kline 176

Tradition and Intertextual Memory in James Joyce's Ulysses / John S. Rickard 195

Plato's Quarrel with the Poets / Stanley Roesn 212

Selected Bibliography 227

Index 233

Contributors 245

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-1322-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-1307-6 / eISBN: 978-0-8223-7920-1 /

Publicity material