Back to the Rough Ground

Joseph Dunne

Description

Back to the Rough Ground is a philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. Its purpose is to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law. Through reflection on key modern thinkers who have revived cardinal insights of Aristotle, and a sustained engagement with the Philosopher himself, it presents a radical challenge to the scientistic assumptions that have dominated how these professional domains have been conceived, practiced, and institutionalized.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Épistémologie
• Éthique et morale
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• management
• Pragmatism
• Metaphysics
• Ethics
• Aristotle

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 1997
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161132
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

BACK TO THE ROUGH GROUND
REVISIONS
A Series of Books on Ethics
General Editors:
Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre
Back to the Rough Ground
Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique
by J OSEPH D UNNE
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 1993 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Foreword to the Paperback Edition 1997 by Alasdair MacIntyre Paperback edition published in 1997 by University of Notre Dame Press
Reprinted in 2001, 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunne, Joseph.
Back to the rough ground : practical judgment and the lure of technique / by Joseph Dunne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-00705-8 (paper : alk. paper)
ISBN 10: 0-268-00705-5 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Rationalism. 2. Reason. 3. Prudence. 4. Practice (Philosophy). 5. Philosophy, Modern-18th century. 6. Philosophy, Modern-20th century. 7. Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics. 8. Technical reason. 9. Practical reason. I. Title.
B833.D86 1997
128 .3-dc21
97-35478 CIP
ISBN 9780268161132
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
To my mother and the memory of my father
Contents
Foreword to the Paperback Edition , by Alasdair MacIntyre
Preface
Introduction
1. Generative Context of the Study and Its Central Issue
2. The Company of Philosophers
3. Conversation as a Mode of Philosophical Inquiry
PART 1: THE RETRIEVAL OF PHRONESIS AND TECHNE IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY
A. Specific Domains: Religion, Art, and Politics
1. J. H. Newman s Appeal to Phronesis in A Grammar of Assent
1. Newman s Critique of Rationalism: Preliminary Remarks
2. Newman and Aristotle
3. Newman and Contemporary Philosophy
4. Incommensurability in Philosophy of Science, Aristotelian Scholarship, and the Grammar
5. Conclusion: Newman on Language
2. R. G. Collingwood s Critique of Techne in The Principles of Art
1. The Technical Theory of Art
2. Imaginative Expression
3. Expression and Language
4. Aesthetics and Ethics: Collingwood and Aristotle
5. Collingwood s Subjectivism and Anti-Individualism
6. Intersubjectivity and Language: What Collingwood Is Trying to Say
3. Hannah Arendt s Distinction between Action and Making in The Human Condition
1. Action and Behavior
2. Uncertain Stories and the Limits of Practical Knowledge
3. Tyranny and the Flight from Action into Making
4. Promising, Forgiving, and the Condition of Plurality
5. Arendt and Aristotle
B. The Universal Scope of Philosophical Hermeneutics
4. The Play of Phronesis and Techne in Hans-Georg Gadamer s Truth and Method
1. Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics
2. The Heideggerian Background
3. Finitude, Tradition, and the Hermeneutical Circle
4. Conversation as the Medium of Effective-Historical Consciousness
5. The Fusion of Horizons in the Act of Application
6. Aristotle as Mentor: The Centrality of the Appeal to Phronesis
7. Gadamer s Account of Experience, in Relation to Aristotle
8. Experience as Being-in-Play
5. Language, Hermeneutics, and Practical Philosophy
1. The Unity of Thought and Language
2. Finitude and the Infinity of Language
3. Limitations of the Statement and the Synthesis of Hermeneutical Ideas in Reflection on Language
4. Beyond Substance Metaphysics : Reflection on Language as a Way of Profiling Techne and Phronesis
5. Theory and Practice: The Extent of Gadamer s Appeal to Aristotelian Practical Philosophy and Phronesis
6. The Scope of Gadamer s Thought: Concluding Questions
C. The Challenge of Critical Theory
6. The Distinction between Praxis and Technique in the Early Philosophy of J rgen Habermas
1. Situating Habermas
2. The Aristotelian Background
3. Praxis Mediated through Modern Thought
4. Habermas and Hermeneutics
5. The Modern Loss of the Distinction between Praxis and Technique
7. Habermas s Later Philosophy: Ambiguities of Rationalization
1. Critique and Praxis: The Shift to the Notion of Communicative Action
2. The Uncoupling of System and Life-World : Progress and Deformation
3. Habermas s Defense of the Rationalization of the Life-World : Technicism in a New Guise?
4. The Life-World and the Limits of Rationalization: The Shadow Side of Habermas s Thought
5. Conclusion: Aporiai in Habermas s Thought and the Point of a Return to Aristotle
Interlude
PART 2: PHRONESIS AND TECHNE IN ARISTOTLE
8. Theory, Techne, and Phronesis: Distinctions and Relations
1. Aristotle s Conception of Theory
2. The Primacy of Theory and the Questionable Status of Practice
3. The Place of Techne and Phronesis, and of the Distinction between Them, in Aristotle s Writings
4. Aristotle s Official Concept of Techne: Its Essential Reference to Fabrication and Its Closeness to Theory
5. Technai of the Kairos and Their Affinity with Phronesis
6. The Distinction between Techne Poi tik and Phronesis
7. Meeting Two Difficulties That Stem from Aristotle s Usage
9. The Circle between Knowledge and Virtuous Character: Phronesis as a Form of Experience
1. Aristotle s Reserve about the Role of Knowledge in Virtue: The Emergence of a Circle between Phronesis and Character
2. The Key to Understanding the Circle Is Experience
3. Interlude: The Nonassimilation of Experience Raises Questions about Techne in Metaphysics 1.1
4. The Appeal to Experience in Nicomachean Ethics 10.9 and 1.3
5. Phronesis and Character as Modalities of Experience
6. Nous , or Perceptiveness with Regard to Ultimate Particulars, as a Crucial Element in Phronesis
7. Suggested Examples of Ultimate Particulars Elucidated by Reference to De Anima and Wittgenstein
8. The Openness of the Phronetic Approach, and How It Differs from Deductivism
9. The Relationship between Universals and Particulars in the Sphere of Phronesis and Eupraxia
10. Beyond the Official Notion of Techne: Recovering the Experiential Background
1. Aristotle s Failure to Distinguish between Techne as an Ability to Analyze and Techne as an Ability to Make
2. Evidence of Two Different Tendencies in Aristotle s Treatment of Techne
3. Aristotle s Neglect of the Role of Experience in Techne Related to His Characteristic Approach to Genesis
4. The Role of Matter in Aristotle s Thought Supports an Emphasis on Experience
5. Implications of the Analogy between Techne and Nature
6. Implications for Techne of Aristotle s Account of Change
7. Aristotle s Account of Soul Supports a Conception of Techne as Embodied
8. Deliberation Reconsidered, and Conclusion
Epilogue
1. The Main Themes
2. Import for Practices
3. Bearings in Philosophy
Notes
Bibliography to Introduction and Part 1
Bibliography to Part 2 and Epilogue
Index
Theuth said, Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom. But the king answered and said, O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them.
Plato, Phaedrus
We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction . Back to the rough ground!
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Foreword to the Paperback Edition
Too many readers of, say, the table of contents of Back to the Rough Ground may conclude too easily and quite mistakenly that it is not a book that deserves their attention. Those with an interest in Aristotle may think that an approach to Aristotle s texts by way of an excursion through five very different nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers is likely to lead to a misreading of Aristotle. This is after all not how books about Aristotle normally proceed. And those who already have an interest in one or more of what at first sight is an assorted bunch of modern thinkers may suppose that they are being invited to revisit all too familiar territory and that these thinkers are being treated as no more than a prologue to Aristotle, and therefore mistreated.
Both responses will miss the point of this remarkable book, a book that certainly brings its author s own critical questions to the reading of the texts, but only in a way that is respectful of their integrity. A third kind of mistake will be made by those who have been provoked by their own experiences into asking persistent questions about the relationship of theory to practice and who think that they have learned from those attempts to find answers that all theoretical discussion of the relationship of theory to practice is barren and unhelpful. Disillusionment with theorizing, let alone philosophical theorizing, as any kind of guide to practice is widespread in our culture. But this book speaks to the concerns of the disillusioned by enquiring just what kind of philosophical theory it is that might after all inform and improve practice and even, on occasion, help to rescue it from its own perplexities. So while readers for whom this aspect of his book is unusually relevant may be among those most likely to be impatient with and even incredulous at the thought that their questions are best approached by an extended interrogation of philosophical texts, such readers are in fact among those who may have most to lose by ignoring this book.
What then does Dunne try to achieve? In the first part of his book he engages in a series of conversations, in each of which an author whose texts are addressed supplies clues and insight