Starting from Søren Kierkegaard's insight that fully accepting the human condition requires one to live with the persistent temptation to escape from it, Ronald Hall finds similar concerns reflected in the work of two modern-day philosophers, Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum, who equally find in a philosophy of love and marriage the key to understanding how humans may achieve happiness in the acceptance of their humanity. All three thinkers follow a "logic of paradox" in showing how success in the human (...) quest to be human depends crucially on the struggle humans experience with the ever-present opportunities to pursue alternative paths. What Kierkegaard called "living existentially" can be achieved only after confronting and refusing the possibilities of living in "aesthetic," "ethical," or even "religious" denial of one's true humanity. By creating this dialogue between the nineteenth-century Danish thinker and two eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Hall reveals the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard's thought to our own age and its cogency as an interpretation of the human predicament. (shrink)

On his deathbed, Wittgenstein is reported to have said, upon hearing that his friends were coming for a visit, “Tell them I've had a wonderful life.” Malcolm found this puzzling, given that Wittgenstein seemed to be fiercely unhappy. I find my way into these words against the backdrop of the Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life and Wittgenstein's famous remark, to wit, “Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” (...) Along the way I discuss Plato's praise of wonder, Nietzsche's attack on science, and Kierkegaard's remark about finding the sublime in the pedestrian. I conclude that Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life insofar as he was fully awake to wonder, what I call the wonder of our words. (shrink)

The companion volume to Arnold Come's Kierkegaard as Humanist, Kierkegaard as Theologian is an exploration of Søren Kierkegaard's deliberately Christian writings, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1846) to For Self-Examination (1851). In his later writings Kierkegaard sought to "get further forward in the direction of discovering the Christianity of the New Testament" to resolve his own spiritual crisis. His struggle to understand how authentic theologizing relates to the spiritual struggles of personal faith led him to a discussion of the (...) three basic foci of his theologizing: the self as gift, that is, a creation "out of nothing" from God; the self as failure, which brings on a state of despair; and the self redeemed by God's love and healing compassion. Come probes some of the problematic aspects of Kierkegaard's theology. He addresses the question of whether God's high intentions and demands for human achievement of selfhood and spirituality justify the unspeakable sufferings entailed in human failures to fulfil those demands. He also explores the puzzling relation between Kierkegaard's seeming assignment of exclusivity to the Christian understanding and experiences of both sin and salvation as well as his assumption of the capacity of humans to recognize the need to turn to the eternal that is immanent in every human consciousness - so-called Religiousness A. (shrink)

The focus of these remarks is on the impact that Personal Knowledge and Philosophical Investigations had in shaping Bill Poteat’s philosophical voice. Of the two works, I claim that, for good or ill, it was Personal Knowledge that had the more profound influence on Poteat. Of course, both sources had profound influence. What makes Personal Knowledge more profound is that his use of it, at least in those early years, was more indirect than his direct and explicit use of Wittgenstein’s (...) ideas. Following Bill’s lead, there is much that Polanyians can learn from Wittgenstein and vice versa. (shrink)

Polanyi’s claim that a wholly tacit knowledge is possible is contested. Polanyi’s praise for the tacit, and his critique of the ideal of total explicitness, harbors a threat of Romanticism, which, in turn, may become a threat to the value of the explicit itself, and ultimately a political threat, something that Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy and political life manifested all too dramatically. Polanyians must not lose sight of the primacy of the explicit for personal existence, something that Polanyi’s work need not (...) undermine, and indeed, that has the resources to affirm and support. (shrink)

Given recent discussions of personal privacy, or more particularly, its invasion via the internet, it is not surprising to find the issue of personal privacy emerging regarding God’s relation to our private lives. Two different and opposing views of this God-person relation have surfaced in the literature: ‘God and Privacy’ by Falls-Corbitt and Michael McLain, and ‘Privacy and Control’ by Scott Davison. I discuss key elements in both sides of this debate. Even though I will register my sympathy with both (...) sides, I claim that both fail to grasp what I call the existential depth of the God-person relationship. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat's philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

Following the suggestion of Naomi Scheman in her essay, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, I undertake to expand on her idea that Wittgenstein’s project can be fruitfully compared to Dorothy’s task in the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, after dreaming of finding a trouble-free place over the rainbow, that is, above the troubles she faced in Kansas, embodied in Miss Gulch, and after having been uprooted from her home and (...) getting just what she wished for, realizes that she wants to return home. Following the yellow brick road, she seeks Oz who can show her the way back to Kansas. I read Wittgenstein’s project as eerily similar. After having left his home in the ordinary, that is, after seeking a way to speak outside of ordinary language games, that is, after his project in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein takes his task to be a return, a return of words from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (shrink)

Mostly in blank verse, I consider the question "What value can a student receive from a single course in philosophy?" More specifically, in line with my own teaching duties, I focus on the value to students of a single course in, say, epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of science or mind. I consider and reject answers based on the examples of introductory instruction in science or in art, finally concluding that even just a bit of this sort of philosophy can communicate (...) some of the delight philosophers enjoy in finding a world of questions in apparently obvious facts of everyday life. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat’s philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

Starting from Søren Kierkegaard's insight that fully accepting the human condition requires one to live with the persistent temptation to escape from it, Ronald Hall finds similar concerns reflected in the work of two modern-day philosophers, Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum, who equally find in a philosophy of love and marriage the key to understanding how humans may achieve happiness in the acceptance of their humanity. All three thinkers follow a "logic of paradox" in showing how success in the human (...) quest to be human depends crucially on the struggle humans experience with the ever-present opportunities to pursue alternative paths. What Kierkegaard called "living existentially" can be achieved only after confronting and refusing the possibilities of living in "aesthetic," "ethical," or even "religious" denial of one's true humanity. By creating this dialogue between the nineteenth-century Danish thinker and two eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Hall reveals the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard's thought to our own age and its cogency as an interpretation of the human predicament. (shrink)

By means of a Kierkegaardian critique of postmodernism, Ronald L. Hall argues that the postmodernist flirtation with Kierkegaard ignores the existential import of his thought. Word and Spirit offers a novel interpretation of Kierkegaard's conception of the self, according to which spirit is essentially linked to the speech act. In an extended interpretation of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Hall uses insights from Austin, Wittgenstein, Polanyi, and Poteat to fill out and explicate Kierkegaard's views in the context of modern language philosophy. The enriched (...) concept of the speech act represented by the Hebrew idea of dabhar frames Hall's critique of irony, romanticism, Don Giovanni, Faust, the demonic, music, and ultimately, postmodernisim in a Kierkegaardian mode. The result of the modern suspicion of speech, Hall concludes, is a demonic, musical spiritlessness. (shrink)

In this essay I argue: that Sartre's account of freedom falls back into the Cartesian problems it is explicitly designed to escape ; that Sartre simply pushes the old Cartesian problem of how a spontaneity can act on an object back to the level of pre-reflective original freedom, without solving it; that Merleau-Ponty's account does indeed move us beyond the Cartesian dilemmas by rooting freedom in its pre-reflective ground of meaning, which, in essence, is the body's pre-reflective relationality to the (...) world; and that Sartre's account of freedom rests only on the obstacle/task dialectic while Merleau-Ponty's account seems to rest on the richer dialectics of both obstacle/task and giving/receiving. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of the theory of meaning in art and religion that Michael Polanyi developed in his last work entitled Meaning. After giving a brief summary of Polanyi’s theory of art, I raise two serious difficulties, not with the theory itself, but with the claims Polanyi makes about the relation of meaning in art to science and religion. Regarding the first difficulty, I argue that Polanyi betrays an earlier insight when in Meaning he attempts to dissociate meaning (...) in art from meaning in science; instead I argue that both science and art are aesthetic enterprises. Regarding the second, I argue that Polanyi’s account of religion is an aesthetic reduction, that meaning in religion, at least in the Western tradition, is not so much an aesthetic as it is an existential matter. (shrink)

This brief essay remembers the late William H. Poteat and outlines his intellectual perspective and its its roots.

The focus of these remarks is on the impact that Personal Knowledge and Philosophical Investigations had in shaping Bill Poteat’s philosophical voice. Of the two works, I claim that, for good or ill, it was Personal Knowledge that had the more profound influence on Poteat. Of course, both sources had profound influence. What makes Personal Knowledge more profound is that his use of it, at least in those early years, was more indirect than his direct and explicit use of Wittgenstein’s (...) ideas. Following Bill’s lead, there is much thatPolanyians can learn from Wittgenstein and vice versa. (shrink)

Editorial preface vol. 70.2 Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s11153-011-9321-6 Authors Ronald L. Hall, Department of Philosophy, Stetson University, DeLand, FL, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047.

(2001). Moving places: A comment on the traveling Vietnam Memorial. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 219-224.

The focus of these remarks is on the impact that Personal Knowledge and Philosophical Investigations had in shaping Bill Poteat’s philosophical voice. Of the two works, I claim that, for good or ill, it was Personal Knowledge that had the more profound influence on Poteat. Of course, both sources had profound influence. What makes Personal Knowledge more profound is that his use of it, at least in those early years, was more indirect than his direct and explicit use of Wittgenstein’s (...) ideas. Following Bill’s lead, there is much that Polanyians can learn from Wittgenstein and vice versa. (shrink)