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Philosophy in the Present Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
Extract
In this paper I want to raise an extremely ancient philosophical problem: the problem of the nature of philosophy itself. But I do not want to answer this question in the abstract, since it is never asked in the abstract. ‘What is philosophy?’ always means ‘What is philosophy for us here and now?’ It is with philosophy ‘here and now’ that I am concerned. Now this ‘here and now’ can be defined in many different ways; the definition I have chosen, with some arbitrariness, is taken over from Heidegger and Ellul. Philosophy ‘here and now’, as I shall read this, means ‘philosophy in a technological age’. The question I want to raise, therefore, can be formulated as the question whether philosophy is possible in a technological age and, if so, under what conditions.
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- Articles
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 561 - 576
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1974
References
1 The Present Age, London 1962Google Scholar.
2 Collected Papers, Volume II, London 1971Google Scholar.
3 What Is Called Thinking? Part I, Lecture 1, New York 1968Google Scholar.
4 As expressed, for example, in T. S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
5 A locus cjassicus is Austin's, J. L. “A Plea for Excuses”, Philosophical Papers, Oxford 1961Google Scholar.
6 For example, Ryle's papers “Systematically Misleading Expressions”, ‘Philosophical Arguments”, and “Proofs in Philosophy”, Collected Papers. Moore's lectures on philosophical analysis, especially the lecture on “The Justification of Analysis”, are revealing, Lectures on Philosophy, London 1966Google Scholar. Also Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
7 Descartes' Meditations, answered by Pascal in Pensée 355, and by Kierkegaard in Johannes Climacus. The difference between the Cartesian and modern outlooks is exhibited in Wittgenstein's, On Certainty, Oxford 1969Google Scholar; e.g., section 115.
8 Article LXX - Article LXXVII.
9 In the famous Ode.
10 Metaphysics A, 2.
11 Wisdom is defined at 1141a 19 as “nous and episteme”, or “perfected knowledge of the highest objects”: literally “the most honourable things”.
12 Ethics, IV, Prop. LXVII: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is not a meditation upon death but upon life”, together with the analysis of freedom in Books IV and V.
13 This motif is presented powerfully and beautifully in the Symposium.
14 Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Simone Weil.
15 Prefaces to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, reprinted handily in Hegel, G. W. F.: On Art, Religion, Philosophy, New York 1970Google Scholar: see, for example, the remarks on p. 145 and p. 280.
16 The basis of this analysis is in Volume III of the Lectureson the Philosophy of Religion, where Hegel describes the collapse of Christianity in the modern (19th century) world.
17 Book Six, Chapter 3 (g). But Father Zossima's words have to be secularized to accord with Hegel's insight into the modern world.