Theodor Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven” is the first philosophically sophisticated attempt to chronicle, if not fully characterize, movements of the mature artwork. With direct reference to Beethoven’s third and final phase, Adorno offers a complex formulation of aging and artistry. He attempts to capture, ambitiously, the content and internal structure of the late artwork, the forms to which that internal structure is responsible, the artistic conventions governing that structure, the sociohistorical conditions in which the work was produced and, finally, (...) the personality of the late artist. Foremost among these formulations is the idea of late style as putatively strange and difficult. Works of the... (shrink)

Putnam’s style is rarely discussed in the secondary literature. In this paper I provide one approach to the kind of writing that philosophy becomes in Putnam’s hands. I focus on Putnam’s argumentative pluralism and, more specifically, the practical form that pluralism takes in Putnam’s commitment to the essay form. I argue that Putnam’s use of the essay form is a crucial expression of his pluralism. Looking at some ancestors of the Putnam essay, I pay attention to the specific hybrid qualities (...) of the philosophical paper. I make a connection between the live tensions at work within the essay form and Putnam’s vigorous resistance to dichotomies in philosophy. I suggest that Putnam’s philosophical resistance to such dichotomies can be understood as the practice of a certain kind of irony. My primary example is Putnam’s work on the fact/value dichotomy. I suggest that Putnam’s irony might present an alternative to the dominant conception of irony in contemporary American philosophy: that of Richard Rorty. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis argues that philosophy must acknowledge its radical informality. I provide a brief account of what Margolis means by informality and its consequences for the practice of a pragmatist philosophy. I discuss his criticism of Robert Brandom's analytic pragmatism on the grounds that it overemphasizes the potential gains of a formal approach. I highlight two concerns with Margolis’ insistence on informality recommending a reduced emphasis on the consequences of informality for the pragmatist philosopher.