Mar 24, 2016 07:51 PM
What is fiction for?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/know-thyse...le/2001258
EXCEPT: . . . The common reader is right, [Bernard] Harrison argues, to believe that literature offers valuable insights into human life that cannot be replaced or duplicated by psychology, sociology, or any of the social sciences. Belief in literature's ability to offer insights into individuals, societies, and the human condition itself has long been the basis for claiming "academic literary studies as a cornerstone of the humanities."
Within the academy, however, defenders of the traditional study of literature—what Harrison calls "literary humanism"—have been overwhelmed in recent decades by attacks launched by French theoreticians [...] seemingly proving the theoretical impossibility of literature providing any insights at all. Foucauldians, deconstructionists, Marxists, and the other factions of the campus left agree that high culture in general, and literary culture in particular, serves no purpose other than "to disseminate false but persuasive visions of the human condition" designed to legitimate one or another form of exploitation.
Harrison's theoretical innovation in answering such views is to call on the account of meaning and language provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. [...] Convinced that the notion of literature as imitation or mimesis is vulnerable to postmodernist critique, Harrison challenges contemporary theory's thesis that "meaning is determined internally to language" and thus "can offer no possible access to any reality transcending language" by adopting Wittgenstein's view of language as "a public institution."
In Harrison's exposition, language is not a self-contained unit but, instead, a "system of publicly recognized practices that are so contrived as to afford roles in their conduct to linguistic expressions." Words, sentences, and other verbal entities are thus connected to the world not because they represent discrete objects but because "our ways of using words" are grounded in the "underlying practices" that make up the human world.
Because language is inextricably connected to human activities— including both interaction between human beings and with the natural world—writers, even writers of fiction, cannot use words without implicitly referring to human life. Harrison points out what would-be creative writers learn early: A writer cannot "make language obedient to his wishes." As Wittgenstein insisted, there is no such thing as a private language. The language a writer uses "is recalcitrant to his will because it is not his property." It is "also the property of a community that extends across a span of time far greater than his lifetime." Wittgenstein's conception of language has implications for the reader or critic as well as the writer....
Hilary Putnam (1926-2016)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-n...57774.html
EXCERPT: On March 13, America lost one of the greatest philosophers this nation has ever produced. Hilary Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89. Those of us who had the good fortune to know Putnam as mentees, colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound gratitude and love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a human being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be themselves, not his acolytes. But it's also good, in the midst of grief, to reflect about Hilary's career, and what it shows us about what philosophy is and what it can offer humanity. For Hilary was a person of unsurpassed brilliance, but he also believed that philosophy was not just for the rarely gifted individual. Like two of his favorites, Socrates and John Dewey (and, I'd add, like those American founders), he thought that philosophy was for all human beings, a wake-up call to the humanity in us all....
http://www.weeklystandard.com/know-thyse...le/2001258
EXCEPT: . . . The common reader is right, [Bernard] Harrison argues, to believe that literature offers valuable insights into human life that cannot be replaced or duplicated by psychology, sociology, or any of the social sciences. Belief in literature's ability to offer insights into individuals, societies, and the human condition itself has long been the basis for claiming "academic literary studies as a cornerstone of the humanities."
Within the academy, however, defenders of the traditional study of literature—what Harrison calls "literary humanism"—have been overwhelmed in recent decades by attacks launched by French theoreticians [...] seemingly proving the theoretical impossibility of literature providing any insights at all. Foucauldians, deconstructionists, Marxists, and the other factions of the campus left agree that high culture in general, and literary culture in particular, serves no purpose other than "to disseminate false but persuasive visions of the human condition" designed to legitimate one or another form of exploitation.
Harrison's theoretical innovation in answering such views is to call on the account of meaning and language provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. [...] Convinced that the notion of literature as imitation or mimesis is vulnerable to postmodernist critique, Harrison challenges contemporary theory's thesis that "meaning is determined internally to language" and thus "can offer no possible access to any reality transcending language" by adopting Wittgenstein's view of language as "a public institution."
In Harrison's exposition, language is not a self-contained unit but, instead, a "system of publicly recognized practices that are so contrived as to afford roles in their conduct to linguistic expressions." Words, sentences, and other verbal entities are thus connected to the world not because they represent discrete objects but because "our ways of using words" are grounded in the "underlying practices" that make up the human world.
Because language is inextricably connected to human activities— including both interaction between human beings and with the natural world—writers, even writers of fiction, cannot use words without implicitly referring to human life. Harrison points out what would-be creative writers learn early: A writer cannot "make language obedient to his wishes." As Wittgenstein insisted, there is no such thing as a private language. The language a writer uses "is recalcitrant to his will because it is not his property." It is "also the property of a community that extends across a span of time far greater than his lifetime." Wittgenstein's conception of language has implications for the reader or critic as well as the writer....
Hilary Putnam (1926-2016)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-n...57774.html
EXCERPT: On March 13, America lost one of the greatest philosophers this nation has ever produced. Hilary Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89. Those of us who had the good fortune to know Putnam as mentees, colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound gratitude and love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a human being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be themselves, not his acolytes. But it's also good, in the midst of grief, to reflect about Hilary's career, and what it shows us about what philosophy is and what it can offer humanity. For Hilary was a person of unsurpassed brilliance, but he also believed that philosophy was not just for the rarely gifted individual. Like two of his favorites, Socrates and John Dewey (and, I'd add, like those American founders), he thought that philosophy was for all human beings, a wake-up call to the humanity in us all....