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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
I once characterized philosophy as 'deliberative discourse about meanings.' The point was, first, that in philosophy one is concerned to decide not what is the case but what and how one is to think; and second, that differences in philosophical approach and practice can best be construed in terms of disagreements about what can be said to be meaningful and about what it is to have meaning.
1 Francis Sparshott, ‘On Saying What Philosophy Is,’ Philosophy in Context 4 (1975) 17-27; ‘Philosophy and the Meaningful,’ Philosophy in Context Supplementary Volume 4 12-22
2 This would not be true of ‘deliberation’ in the Aristotelian sense, a working out of means to a settled end, because what means will achieve that end may be a matter of fact hard enough for any practical purpose; but the kind of deliberation that consists of making up one's mind what to do is something that takes place within the perceived possibilities, and involves the formulation and adoption of ends.
3 Nicomachean Ethics 1093a 28
4 I have explored the structure of this sort of understanding in yet a third case, that of dancing, in a not-yet-published paper called ‘How Can I Know What Dancing Is?'
5 One has quite often been sent by publishers manuscripts from the declining years of once revered colleagues that are simply incoherent or vacuous. Obviously the inner ear has failed, in the sense that the connections it detects are too specialized or tenuous for the rest of the world; just as old poets lose their sense of music and imagery, because what they respond to is now a set of adjustments that operate only within a frame of reference that has too few points in common with the syntheses that constitute the discipline. Partly one supposes that the very old do not notice that they have become odd; partly they no longer care, since neither they nor the gene pool have anything at stake.
6 Denis Diderot, ‘Art,’ in the Encyclopédie; in Encyclopedie: Selections, Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill1965), 3-18. The article was first published in 1751.
7 Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982), ch. 2
8 Plato, Phaedrus 245 A
9 Francis Sparshott, Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical Consideration of the Dance (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988), §3.21. Most philosophical treatments of ‘practice’ are concerned with the kinds of practice or practices that correlate with theory, and do not deal with the general theme that concerns us here.