David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityThe official topic of Steve Fuller’s editorial is aphorisms, but I think that it is early days in his thinking about this interesting genre. He mentions them...

Ong and Derrida are concerned with presence—for Ong the presence of the other; for Derrida the presence of the signified. These seemingly disparate epistemological meanings of 'presence' actually share some striking similarities, but differ about how reason should be figured, that is, what metaphors should be used to conceptualize reason. This disagreement is fundamentally about what Ong called 'analogues for intellect.' After describing the history of Ong's and Derrida's concept of presence, we indicate how the ethical and religious implications Ong (...) and Derrida draw from 'presence' proceed logically from the analogues for intellect that each assumes. We will conclude, first, that these implications reveal a conflict of traditions—philosophy and rhetoric—but we also indicate how Ong's own rhetoric may permit dialogue between traditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Locke, Literary Criticism, and PhilosophyDavid GormanLocke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy, by William Walker; xviii & 227 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, $54.95.Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is one of those large, difficult, canonical works that are cited a great deal more often than they are read. In the case of the Essay this syndrome has resulted in historical mythmaking which, while rightfully monumentalizing Locke’s book, has done (...) so at the expense of its actual or potential significance. Walker’s study is aimed at destroying the myths about the Essay while rethinking its significance, through a carefully rhetorical reading of its text.Rhetoric is, of course, one of the things which Locke—along with Bacon and Descartes—is held to have rejected from philosophical discourse. This image of Locke as a proponent of commonsensical empiricism and an opponent of rhetorically-oriented speculation is one of the mainstays of intellectual history—of several distinct histories, in fact: philosophical, literary, and linguistic. But, Walker argues, it is also a mythic image. He further holds that an attentive, unprejudiced reading of the Essay will illustrate this claim by showing the work to be imagistic through and through. The Locke who emerges from this [End Page 250] rereading is not the sworn enemy of those literary effects to which language lends itself, one who has proven convenient to the formulation of neat defenses of poetry (including rhetoric) against simple-minded epistemologues. Walker’s suggestion is that this Locke, not having existed, had to be invented. The Locke of the Essay as Walker rereads it is, instead, a thinker about mind, language, and their intertwined effects who stands much closer to Nietzsche than anyone might have thought previously. And this Locke is anything but the naive philosophical butt simply awaiting a sophisticated (meaning, linguistically-oriented) deconstruction of the kind associated with Nietzsche.As might be expected from this summary, the spirit of Paul de Man hovers over Walker’s project. But this is deconstruction with a difference (and what other kind is worthwhile?). On the one hand, Walker’s whole analysis follows the mandate laid down in de Man’s celebrated essay on “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (1978), which is to ignore the commonplaces of intellectual history about Locke and to look at the text of the Essay with an eye to what happens there (the relevant passage in de Man is quoted on p. 133). On the other hand, however, the result of following out de Man’s suggestion has been Walker’s discovery and demonstration of severe problems in de Man’s own treatment of Locke and his Essay, a treatment that depends for its effect very strongly on the kind of mythmaking that casts Locke and Nietzsche as antagonists, and more specifically Locke as the problem for which Nietzsche proves the diagnosis.Walker is in fact quite harsh on de Man in places. Thankfully, however, the relevant chapters of his book do more than provide a litany of “de Man’s flagrant violations of fact and reason” (p. 154)—though this is no bad place to start in reconsidering de Man’s analyses, which have all too easily acquired the status of received wisdom. The exemplary achievement of Walker’s book, aside from its careful scrutiny of Locke’s writing, is to have suggested criteria against which deconstructive readings can be judged (a task that deconstructors themselves have been inclined to shirk). After all this, what remains, meanwhile, of the Essay? “I find the Essay to be complicated...,” Walker asserts, modestly but pregnantly (p. xv). Another claim that his study enforces against de Manian orthodoxy is that literary and intellectual history is indeed still possible, not despite but precisely because of close linguistic analysis: the change that rhetorical reading brings to historical study is to show that literary history is more complicated than is often supposed.David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public LifeDavid GormanPoetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha C. Nussbaum; xii & 143 pp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, $20.00.This volume, a revision of lectures given in 1991, is a philosophical study comparing aspects of law and literature. The law in question is contemporary American case law (hence the reference to “Public Life” in the book’s subtitle). The literature (...) to which it is juxtaposed consists primarily of “realist social novels” (p. 87), represented chiefly by Dickens’s Hard Times, though with some attention also given to E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and to passages from Whitman’s poetry (quoted, characteristically, at some length). Nussbaum’s thesis is that both this kind of legal discourse and this kind—or kinds—of literary discourse constitute, involve, or otherwise rely upon an imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities. Thus lawyers have a great deal to learn from literature, insofar as contact with the capacious imaginations of a Dickens or a Whitman can only enlarge the sensibilities of those who read them in a sufficiently open-minded, reflective way.It may be both too kind and overly reductive to ascribe to Poetic Justice such a thing as a thesis. On the contrary, this compact book, like all of Nussbaum’s writings, teems with theories and theses. This is the main reason, I suppose, for the dichotomy of responses to Nussbaum: some find this pullulating quality of her work exhilarating, while others just find it annoying. One advantage that I think both parties will recognize in the compactness of Poetic Justice (due to the constraints of the lecture format) is that it inhibits the author’s native prolixity, which makes her previous books—The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Love’s Knowledge (1990), and The Therapy of Desire (1994)—something of an effort even for Nussbaum’s biggest fans to stay with through every last qualification, tertiary argument, and cross-reference. [End Page 196]The opening pages of these lectures seem, if anything, all too simple. Nussbaum’s initial target is the economistic, deterministic school of social analysis associated with the University of Chicago generally and with Richard Posner in particular, which has lately exercised a disproportionate influence in American jurisprudence and—especially during the Reagan-Bush era—in public policymaking. Against this kind of thinking, which attempts to treat human beings and their actions and decisions as much as possible in terms of quantifiable, statistical measures, Nussbaum emphasizes the autonomy, the irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person’s experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home—hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism. Thus readers will tend to assume from the first lecture (“The Literary Imagination”) that what they are in for, pretty much, is something like Bob Cratchit’s comeback to Ebenezer Scrooge. The Dickensian comparison is not fortuitous, of course, because although the text of reference is Hard Times and not A Christmas Carol, the moral antithesis is familiar enough: a coldly, blindly all-embracing utilitarianism versus a warm, empathetic humanism.Yet, as Nussbaum develops her account, things are not so simple. What emerges is that her aim is not simply to mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing (and thus judging) human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview. This empathetic response to Chicago-style social analysis, in turn, weaves itself into the texture of Nussbaum’s book in two ways. For one thing, it supports her call to treat literature as making a potentially significant contribution to public life, since what better path can there be to understanding neo-utilitarians like Posner than via imaginative portrayals of such paleo-utilitarians as Mr. Gradgrind? For another thing, moreover, the very gesture of trying to empathize with economic determinism rather than trying to bury it serves the purpose of showing up the latter’s limitations, because this kind of other-directed response is just what the utilitarian approach is least... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and KuhnDavid GormanThe American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, by Giovanna Borradori; translated by Rosanna Crocitto; xii & 177pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, $32.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.The idea for this book, first published in Italian in 1991, was good—to assemble a collection of interviews with (...) the key figures in American philosophy. And the list of philosophers whom Giovanna Borradori chose as representing the best in contemporary American thought was very good—as becomes especially clear when in her introduction she mentions the ones who, for whatever reason, got away: Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Nelson Goodman, Saul Kripke, John Rawls, and John Searle (p. 5). Add these names to those of the philosophers whom she was able to interview for this volume, and you have an impressively complete roster of the thinkers who have made the postwar era in the United States arguably one of the great periods of philosophy.Unfortunately, the execution of the book does not fulfill the promise of its conception. And perhaps nothing could have; the fact remains, however, that Borradori proves herself singularly ill-equipped, in terms both of background knowledge and of intellectual orientation, to bring out very much of importance in these important philosophers’ ideas, either in the interviews that she conducts with them or in the prefatory material that she supplies to bind the collection together.The essence of Borradori’s problem is that she approaches these professional academic philosophers with the incongruous assumption that they are [End Page 388] people with interesting general ideas about history, society, art, religion, or whatever—she assumes in short that these professors are intellectuals. But that is scarcely a term that describes your typical American philosopher. Nor do I mean this condescendingly: on the contrary, just what is significant and valuable about contemporary philosophers in the analytic mold (as almost all of Borradori’s interviewees are) is the narrowness of their focus on problems and methods of logic and the natural sciences, the two Archimedean levers by which analytic philosophy has come far closer than anyone could have predicted to moving the conceptual universe decisively.Of course, not everyone views matters this way, and Richard Rorty in particular has made a spectacular career out of disputing this image—largely a self-congratulatory one, as he takes it—of the analytic tradition. Whether his dissent is justified or not, his role in the collection constitutes another of its problems, because he is not just one of the group of thinkers whom Borradori is interviewing: beyond this, it is Rorty’s ideas which supply Borradori with an intellectual program (in default of one of her own), which necessarily distorts her presentation of the other philosophers’ thoughts, and her line of questioning in these interviews. So, for example, all the interviewees are subjected to questions about American Pragmatism generally and John Dewey in particular, not because these things are of any inherent significance to most of them (as several of them point out, politely), but because Rorty thinks that they should be, and because Borradori follows his line unquestioningly. Thus most of the conversations recorded here are at cross-purposes to start with.Borradori provides brief introductions for each interview, betraying little familiarity with the work of the philosophers, particularly when the work involved is at all technical, or more than about ten years old. Except to summarize these summaries her general introduction for the volume does no more than to indulge in the kind of military and cartographic metaphors made tiresomely familiar by such recent European thinkers as Foucault. Little seems to have been lost in the retranslation of this volume from the Italian, except that the historian of science George Sarton has somehow become “Georges Sardon” (p. 31).David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)