Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński

Stikkers and Skowroński’s new book

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PHILOSOPHY IN THE TIME OF ECONOMIC CRISIS. London and New York: Routledge

Contents:

I. The Crisis in Philosophical and Historical Perspective

1. Philosophy and the Crisis of Economic Science, by Kenneth W. Stikkers (Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA)

2. On the Shadow and the Substance: Adam Smith, John Dewey, and the Great Recession, by Michael Schleeter (Pacific Lutheran University, USA)

3. John Dewey: A Philosophy for Times of Crisis, by Matteo Santarelli (Unversity of Molise, Italy)

II. The Narrative and Rhetoric of ‘Crisis’

4. Neopragmatist Ethnocentric Rhetoric on Economic Crisis: Richard Rorty and Social Amelioration by Redescription, by Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński (Opole University, Poland)

5. If Philosophers Are So Smart: A Metaphor of ‘Global Economic Crisis’, by Maja Niestrόj (Opole University, Poland)

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Santayana on Aesthetics

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Santayana on Aesthetics. Santayana was one of the first to teach aesthetics at an American university (the1892-93 course at Harvard, The Sense of Beauty being one of the results). He devoted three books and many papers and chapters on aesthetic themes, yet all his studies served him to create his own position (to be described in Santayana Guide’s Part 10: Aesthetics, Arts, and Literary Figures). His views on aesthetics, as on philosophy in general, stem from his own elaborated system of thought that combines the elements of naturalism, individualism, pragmatism, and Platonism. It is predominantly by means of the categories of his own aesthetics that he provides us with his interpretations in this field as well as on the arts, aesthetic perception, work of art, criticism, on many artists and philosophies of art. Hence, it is difficult to separate Santayana’s views on aesthetics from looking at aesthetics from his own perspective. Interestingly, Santayana was specific on having adumbrated, at least thematically, most of his plots before he developed them in his numerous publications (cf. Ahmore 1966, 25). His thoughts and ideas were implemented also in his own art, which is poetry, literature (he wrote two best-sellers), and criticism.

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Rorty on Santayana

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Richard Rorty on Santayana. Richard Rorty (1931-2007), one of the leading contemporary American philosophers, is perhaps most famous for his claim that philosophy and literature are just two different types of culture. It means that philosophy is not privileged by having any ‘special’ methods (methodology) thanks to which it has a closer access to the truth about the nature of reality, and philosophers, despite their cognitive ambitions, cannot know much more about the reality and truth than novelists, poets, and dramatists can. His philosophical position is commonly known as ‘neopragmatism’ or as an American version of postmodernism, so much developed in France, Germany, and Italy. In his famous Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty recognized the role of Santayana’s philosophy, putting him close to the biggest names: “On the periphery of the history of modern philosophy, one finds figures who, without forming a ‘tradition,’ resemble each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey, the latter Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, are figures of that sort” (Rorty 1979, 367). [Read more…]

Santayana on Barbarism

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Santayana on barbarism. The notion of ‘barbarism’ in Santayana has predominantly (though not exclusively) a form of something that can be called a ‘cultural barbarism’ as opposed to ‘civilization,’ and, in this sense, does not refer directly to any indiscriminate killings or plundering, as it is frequently associated in the popular usage of this term. According to him, barbarism in this cultural form can be found both in the ancient past, when “barbarian genius infused into Christianity” (LR 228) – the Gothic cathedrals having been an example of such an infusion -, and in the modern era, when such eminent representatives of the “poetry of barbarism” can be found as Walt Whitman and Robert Browning. By employing the opposition ‘barbarian-civilized’ in many of his texts, he wanted to tell us that the civilized way of thinking lies in having a clear vision of a perfect life along with the recognition of the ultimate justification of the machinery of life, understanding it with its ideals, wisdom, and beauty (cf. IPR, 166-168); contrary to that, barbarian means “undisciplined, rebellious against the nature of things” (L4, 45). [Read more…]

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