Abstract
Since the time of Socrates, the relationship between the philosopher and the polis has been a notoriously vexed and contentious topic. At the heart of this debate is a philosophical question concerning the very nature of philosophy itself. In this concluding postscript I will attempt to distinguish the kind of attention required of the social critic from that required of the philosopher, by commenting briefly on the activity in which each is engaged. Ultimately, however, I will suggest that criticism and philosophy can best be understood not as the respective projects of distinct individuals, but as complementary activities, each of which can be carried out from within the normative space occupied by its practitioners.
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Notes
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), §455.
Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994), 176–177.
Simone Weil, “The Iliad or The Poem of Force,” in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 244. Referring to the difficulty of doing equal justice to hostile moral outlooks, Winch writes, “A writer who described these kinds of difficulty as well as anyone I can think of was Simone Weil, whose admiration — not to say veneration — for the author of The Iliad may well have been a reflection of her realization how difficult she herself found it to do justice to ethico-religious views as variance with her own passionately held ones.”
Peter Winch, “Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due,” in Can Religion Be Explained Away?, ed. D.Z. Phillips (London: Macmillan, 1996), 173.
D.Z. Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 181.
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the ‘Unfinished Project of Modernity’ (New York: Routledge, 2000), 181–182.
M. Jamie Ferreira, “Normativity and Reference in a Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Religion,” Faith and Philosophy 18 (October 2001), 449, bold font in original.
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© 2005 Richard Amesbury
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Amesbury, R. (2005). Postscript Doing Justice: Criticism and Philosophy. In: Morality and Social Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507951_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507951_8
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