Session Information
13 SES 02 B, Long Paper Session
Long Paper Session
Contribution
Kenneth Wain’s “Autobiography: Self-(re)-Education beyond Literature and Philosophy” (forthcoming in Ethics and Education) ponders the relationship between philosophy and autobiography through a comparison between Rorty and Cavell. The present response pursues this comparison in the light of remarks by Cornell West regarding the importance of the tonality of the philosopher, which West relates to “the nature of their struggle”. This provides an entrée to a reconsideration of some themes Wain takes up, especially concerning the nature of philosophy, its relation to literature, and the significance of the autobiographical. These considerations are pivotal for current tensions threatening the place of the humanities in education and their place, more broadly, in our social and cultural worlds. With the prominence they give to narrative, they touch on sensitivities that are at the heart of the ways in which educational research is conceived, and they refer directly to divergences in the understanding and practice of philosophy itself.
Wain refers to his first reading of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as a momentous occasion, and it was surely a turning point in his career in philosophy of education. As a young man, he had had aspirations to be a writer, and his early expectations of philosophy were that it might answer to those same senses of urgency that had motivated his literary interests. For were not Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, or Sartre and Camus, or Augustine and Pascal indeed responding to such questions? And, surely, between their work and that of the novelists and poets there was no very clear line to be drawn. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, however, which figured early on as a prescribed text in Wain’s undergraduate studies, challenged this expectation and imposed in its place a legislative account of what was philosophy and what was not. In fact, the Anglophone philosophical climate in which he soon found himself tended to include in its conception of pseudo-philosophers precisely those whose work had initially attracted him most to the subject.
If Wain had felt under pressure to reject his earlier hopes for philosophy as tainted with youthful illusion, then in reading Rorty, it seems, he found them redeemed. No doubt others will recognize such signal experiences in reading and, hence, will find mirrored in his recounting of these struggles something of their own philosophical education.
In my exploration of these matters I shall begin by following Wain in the acknowledgement of Rorty’s distinctive and important philosophical endeavour and then develop this along the lines of the comparison with Stanley Cavell to which he is drawn, especially in the context of claims of philosophy’s relation to the autobiographical, and in the light of the educational importance of the humanities.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Brandom, R. (2000) Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Humanism and Naturalism, in: R. Brandom (ed.) Rorty and his Critics (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing), pp. 156-183. Cavell, S.(2010) Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press). Cavell, S. (1988) In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, Chicago University Press). Emerson, R.W. (1983) Self-Reliance, in: Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States), pp. 259-282. Kenny, A. (1980) Review of The Claim of Reason, Times Literary Supplement, 18 April. Rorty, R. (2009) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, with an Introduction by M. Williams (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). Rorty, R. (2007) “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn”, in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) Rorty, R. (2003) “Biography and Philosophy”, interview with Andrzej Szahaj, in: R. Rorty (2006) Take Care of Freedom and Truth will Take Care of Itself: interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. E. Mendieta (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press). Rorty, R. (1999) Truth without Correspondence to Reality, in: C.J. Vosparil and R.J. Bernstein (eds) (2010) The Rorty Reader (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 415-424. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Stevens, W. (1990) The Collected Books (New York, Vintage Books). Upham, S.P. (ed.)(2002) Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, Foreword by T. Scanlon (London and New York, Routledge). Voparil, C.J. (2010) General Introduction, in: C.J. Voparil and R.J. Bernstein (eds) The Rorty Reader (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 1-52. Wain, K. (2013) Autobiograph: Self-(re)-Education beyond Literature and Philosophy, Ethics and Education (forthcoming). Williams, M. (2009) Introduction to the Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition, in: R. Rorty (2009), pp. xiii-xxix.
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