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Title: Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy by Bruce Wilshire ISBN: 0-7914-5430-4 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2 (1 review)
Rating: 2
Summary: not compelling
Comment: As a continental critique of analytic philosophy, the book is not especially useful (I myself belong to the continental camp, and so am not taking issue with Wilshire in the name of defending analytic philosophy).
Though there is certainly something to the old charge that analytic philosophy is a narrow technical discipline unable to reflect on life in all its breadth, Wilshire makes this case without much vigor, and in a way that often lapses into continental cliche. I was not impressed that his chief target in this polemic was a pair of Princeton grad student job-seekers overheard making arrogant remarks in an APA hotel elevator by his friend John Stuhr. I'm not kidding: Wilshire returns to this anecdote at least twice after its initial appearance. (This from a man who later boasts that "nobody can accuse me of picking on weaklings." Consider the accusation made.) Further weakening his fight against analytic philosophy is a series of gratuitous critiques of technology of the romantic Heideggerian variety, such as a sneering throwaway remark about Disneyland-- another notable weakling in philosophy circles. The fact that Wilshire packages together numerous unrelated polemics in his book only shows that he is insufficiently critical concerning his own prejudices, and as a result is unable to stick to the topic at hand. Continental philosophy will not begin to gain ground in this country until it stops whining about analytic pre-eminence and starts actually producing interesting new philosophy. This section of the book also offers a fruitless caricature of Descartes, as well as the strange contention that analytic philosophers have not come to terms with the legacy of Kant (if anything unites analytics and continentals, it is surely the deep indebtedness to the anti-metaphysical strains in Kant).
The historical portions of the book are a more mixed bag. Wilshire's account of the late-1970's pluralist rebellion at the APA is quite a fine story, and always remains fair in its expose of analytic arrogance during that period and beyond. But the author dates himself with his chapter-long discussion of early American continental philosophers of the James Edie generation, exaggerating their accomplishments in the dreamy way that children imagine their parents to be important figures in the world at large. One redeeming feature here is Wilshire's interesting case for the pivotal importance of William James among the early SPEP crowd. Painting the continentals as the true heirs of classical American philosophy may seem like a stretch when examining the products of current Black Forest tourists like Sallis and Krell, but makes more sense through Wilshire's memories of an earlier generation of American continenal philosophers.
All in all, this book is a sometimes interesting outburst by a survivor from the earlier days of phenomenology & existential phenomenology. But it fails to provide new weaponry in the struggle against analytic hegemony. Also, the author admits that the book was originally a series of unrelated essays, and it shows.
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Title: God's Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson ISBN: 0060185163 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser ISBN: 0618334661 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 08 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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