Barry Allen explores the concept of knowledge in Chinese thought over two millennia and compares the different philosophical imperatives that have driven Chinese and Western thought. Challenging the hyperspecialized epistemology of modern Western philosophy, he urges his readers toward an ethical appreciation of why knowledge is worth pursuing.

The first book to focus on the intersection of Western philosophy and the Asian martial arts, _Striking Beauty_ comparatively studies the historical and philosophical traditions of martial arts practice and their ethical value in the modern world. Expanding Western philosophy's global outlook, the book forces a theoretical reckoning with the concerns of Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic and technical dimensions of martial arts practice. _Striking Beauty_ explains the relationship between Asian martial arts and the Chinese philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, (...) and Daoism, in addition to Sunzi's _Art of War_. It connects martial arts practice to the Western concepts of mind-body dualism and materialism, sports aesthetics, and the ethics of violence. The work ameliorates Western philosophy's hostility toward the body, emphasizing the pleasure of watching and engaging in martial arts, along with their beauty and the ethical problem of their violence. (shrink)

Knowledge and Civilization advances detailed criticism of philosophy's usual approach to knowledge and describes a redirection, away from textbook problems of epistemology, toward an ecological philosophy of technology and civilization. Rejecting theories that confine knowledge to language or discourse, Allen situates knowledge in the greater field of artifacts, technical performance, and human evolution. His wide ranging considerations draw on ideas from evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, and the history of cities, art, and technology.

" Barry Allen shows what truth has come to mean in the philosophical tradition, what is wrong with many of the ways of conceiving truth, and why philosophers ...

Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and (...) works of performance art, especially dance. (shrink)

The book concludes that it is a mistake to think of Art as something subjective, or as an arbitrary social representation, and of Technology as an instrumental ..

Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. But is this a problem with any machine or only some applications of some machines by some people? I show that the problem is not with machines per se but with the people who introduce them, or more exactly with their knowledge. It is not knowledge as such that causes the disorder Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with machines; it is confused, disordered knowledge—superficial, inadequate, unsubtle, and artless. In other words the problem (...) is not with machines but with the ethics of engineering and the government of technology. The Daoist argument does not devalue machines or knowledge of them; instead, it sets a new goal, defining an alternative ideal—alternative to techniques held hostage to despotic ideas about efficiency and profit. (shrink)

The now-global phenomenon of Asian martial arts traces back to something that began in China. The idea the Chinese communicated was the dual cultivation of the spiritual and the martial, each perfected in the other, with the proof of perfection being an effortless mastery of violence. I look at one phase of the interaction between Asian martial arts and Chinese thought, with a reading of the Zhuangzi 莊子 and the Daodejing 道德經 from a martial arts perspective. I do not claim (...) that the authors knew about martial arts. It was not Daoist masters who took up martial arts, but martial arts masters who, at a specific time, turned to Daoism to explain the significance of their art. Today, though, Daoist concepts are ubiquitous in martial arts literature, and a reading of these classics from a martial arts perspective shows how they lend themselves to philosophical thinking about this practice. (shrink)

Frank in this article treats the disagreement between François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over whether there are arguments that cannot be decided rationally. Lyotard identifies rational undecidability as the “postmodern condition.” Habermas objects that reasonable procedures do exist that are adequate for the resolution of any argument among reasonable participants. Frank judges Lyotard’s argument as unpersuasive yet blames Habermas for dismissing altogether the idea of rationally undecidable disagreements. Frank then turns from contemporary philosophy to early German Romantic hermeneutics and literary (...) theory to substantiate a claim that unresolvable disagreement exists even amid consensus. “Every consensus,” Frank writes in explication of Friedrich Schleiermacher, “contains a residual misunderstanding that will never entirely go away, and this is why no consensus as to either the meaning or the interpretation of the world can ever be final or universally valid.” Frank moreover cites the even more radical position of Friedrich Schlegel: “All truth is relative—but together with that proposition another must be coordinated: there is essentially no such thing as error.” Frank’s own conclusion, reached after comparing these Romantic notions with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, is that “the shaping of consensus will never lead us to a universal symbolism that everyone must make use of in the same way.”. (shrink)

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s (...) authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life. (shrink)

Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial problem (...) of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part One), and its content (Part Two). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I call ceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

Henri Bergson and William James were great admirers of each other, and James seemed to think he got valuable ideas from Bergson. But early critics were right to see in Bergson the antithesis of pragmatism. Unfolding this antithesis is a convenient way to study important concepts and innovations in Bergson's philosophy. I concentrate on his ideas of duration and intuition, and show how they prove the necessity of going beyond pragmatism. The reason is because knowledge itself goes beyond the utilitarian (...) limitations in which pragmatism confines it. Knowledge is more than utility, more than adaptation, more than pragmatism, because our cognitive powers prove capable of more than any naturally selected service to survival. (shrink)

Critical notice of Bernard Williams, "Truthfulness".

Are there matters we should exclude from inquiry? Personal privacy apart, it seems difficult to justify. By what higher, better knowledge than the results of inquiry itself could one know what inquiry ought not know? Is such knowledge a metaphysical intuition whose authority cannot be questioned? Isn't that a fairy-tale? But what about ethics? What about ethical limitations on knowledge? Can they not concern more than simply what to do with knowledge we have, concerning instead the very dynamic of knowledge, (...) the direction of inquiry itself? Might not the best ethics of knowledge teach that certain directions of inquiry are forbidden, like a trespass against personal privacy? (shrink)

The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, discursive, logocentric presumptions. I interpret knowledge as a quality of artifacts. A surgical operation (...) or a bridge may be as good examples of knowledge as any true scientific proposition or theory. I define the quality that marks an artifact as a work of knowledge as superlative artifactual performance. To explain knowledge in these terms is not to offer a metaphysical or epistemological theory of its essence or concept. Instead, I am explaining knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know. (shrink)

A negative judgment (“S is not p”) says what is not the case, but since what is not the case is nothing and does not exist, a negative judgment says nothing, and is not a judgement at all. Wittgenstein called this “the mystery of negation.” By negation I can be right in what I say even though I say nothing at all. No less fastidious a logician than Rudolf Carnap sneered at philosophers who take such trifles seriously. Parmenides, the first (...) of many who did, drew the conclusion that one simply cannot say or think what is not, admonishing followers, “Say and think only this, being is.” The challenge philosophers inherit from Parmenides is to explain an account of thought and being that liberates negation from its ontological prison and lets it loose into the world again. The price they usually pay for their explanation is metaphysical idealism. The truth of thinking (including thinking what is not) must depend on nothing but thinking itself, and the favorite way of explaining that is to identify being with thought. If I think it, truly think it, then it is. With Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, and Hegel, this is also Kimhi’s position, though I find him too discreet about the idealistic quality of the philosophy he explains. To brutally summarize, the idea is that to think what is not is to think what is, with a self-consciousness of disagreement. There is no difference of content between “S” and “not-S”; the difference lies entirely in the self-consciousness we bring to it. That sounds fine until we ask, what is this self-consciousness, and what is happening when one becomes self-aware of agreement or disagreement? Is that a natural activity like respiration, or an evolved animal power like vision? Kimhi says the thinking in “S thinks that p” is an activity sui generis, without analogy in living nature, a conclusion that is not available to anyone who takes Darwin seriously. He says nature does not include thinkers or thinking, which places us somewhere beyond nature. Nature is a whole, but not the whole of being. And beyond nature is . . . what? We have to use our imagination. So much onto-psychology just for a puzzle about negation? Why not naturalize logic, and truth too? Kimhi acknowledges resistance to the putative uniqueness of thinking then sets it aside. He does not explain how his theory speaks to the reasons against idealism, rationalism, or androcentric human exceptionalness. These are serious challenges to philosophical practice that should not be ignored, not even by logicians. (shrink)

Sage knowledge knows the evolution of circumstances from an early point, when tendencies may be inconspicuously, “effortlessly” diverted. This knowledge is expressed, not “represented,” being an intensive quality of action rather than of belief, proposition, or theory, and its effortlessness is not a matter of effort versus no effort, but of the intensity with which effort tends to vanish. The value of such knowledge and the explanation of its accomplishment in terms of perceiving incipience or “really seeing the little things” (...) crisscross lines among Confucians, Neo-Confucians, Daoists, and Art of War thinkers. What distinguishes these currents arises not from different definitions or justifications of knowledge but instead different ideas about how to acquire such knowledge and especially how to train it for wisdom. (shrink)

A singularity of the famous Art of War《孫子兵法》 attributed to Sunzi is the way this work conceives of knowledge as a resource for the military strategist. The idea is new in Chinese tradition, and new in the worldwide context of thinking about strategy, where Sunzi’s ideas about the value of knowledge are far in advance of the thinking of Western theorists like Machiavelli or especially Clausewitz. In this paper I analyze the role of knowledge in the Sunzi theory of strategy, (...) and show the consistency of what this work says about knowledge with a philosophical idea of knowledge that emerges in Warring States texts of diverse genres. (shrink)

Similarities between Daoism and Chan (Zen) are often merely verbal, a skillful appropriation by Chan authors of a vocabulary that seems Daoist only to a point, and then departs in a predictable way. What makes the departure predictable is the completely different understanding of emptiness in Chan and Daoism, supporting a no less different understanding of the value of knowledge. Daoism remains optimistic about knowledge in a way Chan is not. Buddhist wisdom exhausts life, extinguishes it, does not nourish it, (...) and therefore cannot satisfy the Daoist conviction concerning the value of knowledge. (shrink)

A memoir of Richard Rorty as a teacher, a philosopher, an intellectual, and a man of letters, by a former student.

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 231-238, December 2019.

This book tries to do two things that do not have much to do with each other. One is to excoriate the White Privilege that dominates academic philosophy in leading US university departments, and disallows the study of non-canonical philosophy, works from Chinese, Indian, Indigenous, or African traditions. “It is not real philosophy,” they say, with no apprehension about exposing blank ignorance of material they dismiss as unfit for their curricula. The other thing the book does is answer the blockheads (...) of the US Republican Party, who mock higher education and see philosophy as the ultimate elitist improvidence, sometimes discreetly hiding their own graduate credentials, even in philosophy. Against academic philosophy’s White Privilege, Van Norden shows that non-canonical philosophy has arguments too, just like canonical texts, sometimes even better. Against Mario Rubio, Ben Carson, and their ilk, he argues that philosophy is good training, leads to good jobs, and is opposed only by hypocritical anti-elite elites who prefer the masses dumb and reserve elite education for their own. (shrink)

This is a book in the series Re-Reading the Canon from the Pennsylvania State University Press. The general editor explains that the series offers "feminist interpretations of the writings of major figures in the Western philosophical tradition," with attention to the ways in which philosophers' assumptions about gender figure in their work. Volumes have already appeared on Plato, Hegel, Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, and Arendt. Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault collects twelve articles, four previously published. Reprinted authors include Nancy Fraser and (...) Nancy Hartsock, with new papers by Judith Butler, Jana Sawicki, Jon Simons, and others. (shrink)

The drive of this book, without ever quite saying so, is to recommend Aristotle’s teaching on truth for contemporary thought. The book is more about concepts and arguments around truth than about truth per se. The explanation of the famous definition of truth, as saying of what is that it is, occupies a few pages. The rest of the book elucidates the vast subtext of this limpid passage. What must intellect be, what must speech be, what must beings be, for (...) this saying of what is? The “correspondence theory of truth,” which textbooks routinely attribute to Aristotle, is repudiated. Correctness and accuracy are not the fundamental values of truth. They are byproducts of a more fundamental responsiveness to the way .. (shrink)

In this introduction to Part 1 of the Common Knowledge symposium, “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's editor discusses four essays from the 1980s by Richard Rorty, in which Rorty chose to associate himself with various neopragmatists, Continental thinkers, and “left-wing Kuhnians” under the rubric of the “new fuzziness.” The term had been introduced as an insult by a philosopher of science with positivist leanings, but Rorty took it up as an “endearing” compliment, arguing that “to be less fuzzy” was also to (...) be “less genial, tolerant, open-minded, and fallibilist.” He defined the “new fuzziness” as “an attempt to blur just those distinctions between the objective and subjective and between fact and value which the critical conception of rationality has developed.” This introduction also examines W. V. Quine's essay “Speaking of Objects” (1957), which describes objects as fuzzy “half-entities”; Clifford Geertz's essay “Blurred Genres” (1980), which advises social scientists that being “taxonomically upstanding” is futile; and Lofti Zadeh's article “The Concept of a Linguistic Variable and Its Application to Approximate Reasoning” (1975), which abandons “Aristotelian, bivalent logic” in favor of a “fuzzy logic” based on Zadeh's “fuzzy set theory.” This introductory piece relates these theoretical works of the past half-century to the sorites paradox and to classical issues of vagueness raised and still unresolved in Western philosophy. Returning then to Rorty, the author questions how Rorty expected his endorsement of the “new fuzziness” to be applied, as proposed, to theology and politics. Suggesting that such applications are the natural work of historians, the author, having asked the historian Natalie Zemon Davis for comment, then quotes her response—which associates fuzzy studies, “common knowledge,” and peacemaking—at length. (shrink)

Craft work (for example, ceramics and furniture) poses a dilemma for modern thinking about beauty and the arts. Because of its beauty, craft has more than mere functionality, yet because of its functionality it cannot be fine art. What should craftmakers do? Claim their work to be fine art and forget about functionality? Or remain loyal to functionality (you can eat noodles from the finest ceramic bowl) and face extinction competing with machine-made products of industrial design? Apparently, the tendency is (...) to abandon functionality, though Risatti thinks that is a mistake. Craft is not craft without functionality; bowls too large to lift have become the useless art of sculpture. Function is important because it implies a relation to the hands that make and use the work, guaranteeing human scale and meaning. How much fine art can you say that about? The real threat to craft is not assimilation to fine art, however. The effect of industrial design and machine production is to divorce the way a thing looks from how it is made. Never has so little of our artifactual environment actually been made by hand, and it’s a loss. A loss of connection. A thing made by and for the hands has a sense that transcends our differences and when beautifully made is an eloquent reminder of where ingenuity ultimately comes from. (shrink)

According to Davidson, Quine, by overcoming the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, made the philosophy of language a serious subject. According to Rorty, Davidson, in concluding that "there is no such thing as a language," attains its most advanced position. How impoverished philosophy has become! It even becomes a kind of accomplishment to show that work which seemed new and different (deconstruction) is really the same old thing. Wheeler's book domesticates deconstruction for Analytic philosophers, with their snuffy ideas about (...) their own rigor, and their complacent indifference to anything unfamiliar or difficult. Derrida emerges as a same-sayer, saying the same as Quine, who says the same as Davidson, who says the same as Wittgenstein. The same old same old. Analytic philosophers should find this comforting. Others may worry that it might be true. (shrink)

Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sexes. Darwin thought the (...) conspicuous sexual differences among animals are adaptations to female choice. Down to our day the biology of sexual selection confirms his melodramatic cliches: Males are passionate, armed, and ornamented, females coy and drab, conflict inevitable and ubiquitous. Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, dismisses sexual selection as “pure ideology.” “A huge body of scientific theory is incorrect.” All the parts that overlook the evolution of real cooperation, meaning not the coincidence of selfish interests, but coordinated collaboration. The evidence of such cooperation between the sexes is diverse, cumulative, and much underappreciated. Roughgarden also takes friendship and pleasure seriously. Intimate contact keeps animals coordinated, and mutual pleasure makes cooperation self-policing, without the punishing algorithms postulated by Evolutionary Psychology. Her book is a serious work of science. She argues that “sexual selection can never be demonstrated once studies are sufficiently thorough,” and shows that this whole area of evolutionary biology “is not settled science, is in considerable flux, and is not ready for export.” If you research any field affected by the claims of Sexual Selection, Evolutionary Psychology, or the Selfish Gene, you may want to study this book. (shrink)

This article confronts Richard Rorty's idea of cultural politics with Bruno Latour's argument for extending democracy to nonhuman things. Why does Latour make this argument? How many of his assumptions might Rorty share? Quite a few, it turns out. Additionally, ethical integration with nonhumans promises to advance the cosmopolitan politics we require for an effective response to ecological crisis.

In this sweeping volume of comparative philosophy and intellectual history, Barry Allen reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European and world traditions. His work traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. He surveys medical empiricism, Aristotlean and Epicurean empiricism, the empiricism of Gassendi and Locke, logical empiricism, radical empiricism, transcendental empiricism, and varieties of anti-empiricism from Parmenides to Wilfrid Sellars. Throughout this extensive intellectual history, (...) Allen builds an argument in three parts. A richly detailed account of history's empiricisms in Part One establishes a context in Part Two for reconsidering the work of the radical empiricists--William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is "radical" about them is their effort to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. In Part Three, Allen sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other, slipping over each other instead of intertwining as they did in European history, a difference Allen attributes to a different understanding of the value of knowledge. Allen's book recovers empiricism's neglected, multi-textured contexts, and elucidates the enduring value of experience, to arrive at an idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism. (shrink)