Reshaping Reason

Toward a New Philosophy

John McCumber

Publication Year: 2005

<P>In Reshaping Reason, John McCumber advocates new life for American philosophy. At present, McCumber believes, American philosophy is ready to go in new directions, but American philosophers remain hopelessly divided between analytic or Continental approaches. There seems to be no middle ground, and the debate between the two traditions has created indifference to the field, both in wider intellectual culture and among philosophers themselves. Here, McCumber brings together aspects of analytic and Continental philosophy to give, for the first time, a fully temporalized account of reason. He proposes an expanded set of rational tools for reason and with these tools takes a fresh look at key issues in ontology, ethics, and social philosophy. This is a gutsy and ambitious book that not only shows philosophy's achievements and failures in cold light, but suggests how philosophy might become more rigorous and relevant to society at large.</P>

Published by: Indiana University Press

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Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant found philosophy blocked by an undigested quarrel between two groups he called "dogmatists"� and "skeptics."� Kant realized that old ways...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xvii-

I would first like to thank those who freed up for me the time to write this book. My UCLA Dean, Pauline Yu, and my Dean at Northwestern and again at UCLA, Eric Sundquist, were open to crucially creative arrangements concerning leaves. My colleagues...

Abbreviations

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pp. xix-

1. Historico-Philosophical Prologue

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pp. 1-56

Everything we do- every act, utterance, or omission- fits into something ongoing and therefore is in part a response to something. To understand why, we need only to recall that acts (omissions, utterances) are events, i.e., alterations in the state...

2. Enlarging the Philosophical Toolbox

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pp. 57-103

Philosophers, like other workers, have what I will call their "toolboxes"- their repertoires of implements which they use to get their jobs done. Most workers have, and often prefer to have, too many tools; their toolboxes contain tools they certainly will...

3. From Metaphysics to Ontologies

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pp. 104-160

Ontologies, of which the most influential constitutes what I will call "metaphysics," are produced by temporalized reason and are temporal themselves. They come and go in history, and that they do so is necessary to how they...

4. The Edge of Ethics

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pp. 161-231

"Ethics," as understood in modernity, focuses on the rightness and wrongness of actions. The focus is misleading in that actions never occur outside of wider social and natural contexts to which they respond. Individual, community, and society clearly...

Epilogue

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pp. 232-233

Preposterous to think that a single issue raised in this book has received any kind of adequate treatment, let alone a definitive one. Preposterous to think that the great and ancient domains of logic, ontology, and ethics have...

Notes

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pp. 235-248

Bibliography

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pp. 249-257

Index

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pp. 259-263

E-ISBN-13: 9780253110503
E-ISBN-10: 0253110505
Print-ISBN-13: 9780253345035

Page Count: 288
Illustrations: 1 figures, 1 bibliog., 1 index
Publication Year: 2005