I am a retired professor of philosophy, but my academic training was in modern languages. I am also an active jazz saxophonist. My dissatisfaction with many established approaches to literature led me to look at literary theory, which then made me focus on philosophy. Academic philosophy, though, seemed to me too often to concentrate on questions about theorising knowledge that neglected questions about how we actually make sense of the world. This led me to reassess the importance of art, particularly music, for philosophy. My chosen books suggest alternative ways of looking at the concerns of philosophy at a time when humankind’s relationship to nature is clearly in deep crisis.
I have been frustrated for years at how much philosophy fails to find ways of both acknowledging the astounding achievements of modern science and responding to how exclusive focus on the sciences can seem to make the world mechanical and meaningless.
Instead of seeing science as the search for a timeless true picture of the world, Dewey shows how to attend to all the ways in which we actively participate in and interact with the world. This chimes with my experience that being actively involved in music makes more sense of the world than almost anything else I do.
About The Book: "The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action" by Dewey examines the tension between pursuing fixed truths and embracing uncertainty. Dewey argues for accepting diverse ideas while retaining control over actions, emphasizing the role of methodical inquiry in naturalizing intelligence. He proposes a Copernican revolution in thought, advocating for pragmatic experimentation over rigid adherence to doctrine. This seminal work challenges conventional beliefs about certainty, promoting a flexible, method-driven approach to knowledge and action. Dewey's insights offer a compelling framework for navigating the complexities of intellectual authority and the construction of "good." About…
I like books that change the very ways in which I see and understand the world.
Polanyi’s The Great Transformation from the end of WW2 made it much clearer to me how a world which regularly finds technological solutions to humankind’s problems could also descend into barbarism. Modern capitalism’s subordinating the functioning of society to the demands of the market changes the status of nature itself in ways that I am increasingly aware of, as the ecological crisis threatens the very survival of humankind.
The book appeals to me not least because of the ways in which it draws important philosophical conclusions from a detailed historical narrative rather than just stating theoretical positions.
In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the "great transformation" of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have never found many philosophical accounts of ethics very satisfactory, because they don’t adequately explore how value is rooted in the myriad ways we relate to the world.
Graeber’s book takes a key notion, debt, that connects economics to ethics, in order to try and understand the origins and development of the distortions of human relationships that are characteristic of modern capitalism.
His conclusion that ‘money has no essence. It’s not “really” anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention’, which he arrives at through a detailed historical and anthropological investigation of debt, led me to reexamine very many assumptions about how the world works.
Now in paperback: David Graeber's “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debt
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Pippin’s book impresses me because it makes clear how the modern German philosophy of Kant, Hegel and others, may fail to get to grips with deeper questions concerning why things matter at all.
Western philosophy is concerned with reconciling thinking and reality, but this neglects the fact that meaningfulness is not fully grasped by what can be rationally known and explained. Our sense of things mattering precedes whatever we may come to know about them: think of how music can grip us in ways which we can never fully explain. This issue leads Pippin to a hugely enlightening account of the difficult (and problematic) work of Martin Heidegger that I find the most plausible interpretation of his work.
This book shows how one can question the very status of philosophy in the modern era, and think about alternative ways of making sense of things.
A provocative reassessment of Heidegger's critique of German Idealism from one of the tradition's foremost interpreters.
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended-failed, even-in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger's critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger's basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy's attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism.
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
Moore’s book seems exemplary to me because it offers a broad historical picture of alternatives in modern philosophy, based on the simple idea that metaphysics is ‘the most general attempt to make sense of things’.
This connects philosophy to everyday experience, which relies precisely on how we make sense of things.
I like the fact that the book allows one to ask questions about the sense knowledge makes of the world, given that much of the sense we make actually comes through active participation in the world, for example in listening to or playing music, or, indeed, in doing philosophy in relation to a real world problem.
This book is concerned with the history of metaphysics since Descartes. Taking as its definition of metaphysics 'the most general attempt to make sense of things', it charts the evolution of this enterprise through various competing conceptions of its possibility, scope, and limits. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with the early modern period, the late modern period in the analytic tradition, and the late modern period in non-analytic traditions. In its unusually wide range, A. W. Moore's study refutes the tired old cliche that there is some unbridgeable gulf between analytic philosophy and philosophy of other…
Modern philosophy tends to be heavily focused on the theory of knowledge. This focus derives from a story about philosophy which begins when Descartes decides to doubt everything he knows. This story is peculiar insofar as modern science actually provides huge amounts of warrantable knowledge.
What lies behind the story, I claim, is a deeper concern with why and how things matter to us at all, that is often best understood via the modern history of thinking about and producing art. The modern world is characterised by profound changes in humankind’s relationship to nature, which transform the significance of art, and can suggest that art may become a kind of philosophy, and philosophy a kind of art.
