Philosophy's Artful Conversation
Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.

Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

1119132761
Philosophy's Artful Conversation
Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.

Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

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Philosophy's Artful Conversation

Philosophy's Artful Conversation

by D. N. Rodowick
Philosophy's Artful Conversation

Philosophy's Artful Conversation

by D. N. Rodowick

Hardcover

$48.00 
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Overview

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.

Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674416673
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 01/05/2015
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

D. N. Rodowick is Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

In Place of Beginning Again… ix

1 A Permanent State of Suspension or Deferment 1

2 How Theory Became History 4

3 "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences" 37

4 "I will teach you differences" 46

5 An Assembling of Reminders 54

6 "…a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing" 61

7 Gedankenwegen: On Import and Interpretation 69

8 "Of which we cannot speak…": Philosophy and the Humanities 93

9 What is (Film) Philosophy? 106

10 Order Out of Chaos 117

11 Idea, Image, and Intuition 132

12 The World, Time 159

13 The Ordinary Necessity of Philosophy 179

14 "Art now exists in the condition of philosophy" 186

15 Falling in Love with the World 197

16 Ontology and Desire, or a Moving Response to Skepticism 204

17 Automatism and the Declaration of Existence in Time 216

18 Ethical Practices of the Ordinary 232

19 Perfectionism as Self-Disobedience 239

20 Comedy and Community 246

21 A Digression on Difference and Interpretation 260

22 Perfectionism's Ironic Transport 266

23 An Elegy for Theory 294

Acknowledgments 309

Index 311

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