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'Some Old Names for a New Way of Thinking: Santayana's Style'

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-28, 13:50 authored by Paul JennerPaul Jenner
Richard Rorty once suggested that, following a rigorous process of auto-critique, analytical philosophy attained coherence at a stylistic level, rather than being co-terminus with philosophy as such. Rorty’s subsequent reassurance that this was no bad thing, since the analytical style was, after all, a good style, seems less than reassuring, in part because of the philosophical resistance to style. Stanley Cavell—a philosopher certainly possessed of a distinctive style—has drawn attention to the tension, within philosophy, between the stylisation of and responsiveness to experience. Taking Rorty’s and Cavell’s reflections as a starting point, this paper considers the status of George Santayana’s philosophy in relation to overlapping questions concerning style: prose style within philosophy, styles of philosophy, and philosophy as a style. Santayana’s poetic materialism and modest meta-philosophical premises make style central to his work in ways that anticipate the questions raised by Rorty and Cavell.

History

School

  • The Arts, English and Drama

Department

  • English and Drama

Published in

Journal of Philosophical Research

Volume

39

Pages

- - - (-)

Citation

JENNER, P., 2014. 'Some Old Names for a New Way of Thinking: Santayana's Style'. Journal of Philosophical Research, 39, pp.353-363

Publisher

© Philosophy Documentation Center

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

ISSN

1053-8364

Language

  • en

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