Interpreting Leamer

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clark Glymour
Keyword(s):  
Professional Philosopher

It is easy for a professional philosopher who reads Learner's essay “Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics” to find a great deal in it that seems contentious, cavalier, or objectionable. Philosophers may even be puzzled as to what the fuss is all about. My guess is that the sorts of complaints philosophical readers are likely to make about Learner's paper are more the result of style than substance. The substance is very important.

Philosophers and Public Policy

Worldview ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Bernard Murchland
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Obligations ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scene

When I first began to study philosophy, there was not much concern with its political implications. One thought of philosophers as being a few removes from the public forum, concerned with loftier matters, operating far from the untidiness of the social scene in a cool oasis where the imagination could play and consciousness unfold at its own pace. It was a pure world, to be sure, and the purist view is by no means an obsolete one. Just the other day I heard a well-known philosopher in heated argument with a campus activist say that the responsibilities of a professional philosopher end with his profession, that his political obligations qua philosopher were nil.

Escape from Boredom: Edification According to Rorty

1981 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Levi
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
The Future ◽  
Academic Philosophy

Richard Rorty sings in the antifoundationalist chorus. His song equates the rise of foundationalist epistemology with the professionalization of philosophy. The discordant notes he finds in the foundationalist score become, as a consequence, subversive of philosophy as an autonomous discipline.Nonetheless, the most salient feature of Rorty's recent book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is that it is by a professional philosopher, for professional philosophers and about the future of philosophy as a profession. The early chapters of the book are polished pieces of professional philosophical prose addressed to issues which have provoked interest in recent years among members of academic philosophy departments. They represent efforts to undermine foundationalist epistemology even in some of its currently fashionable guises as philosophy of language.

Semyon Frank

2020 ◽  
pp. 494-509
Author(s):  
Philip Boobbyer
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Christian Realism ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Church

Semyon Liudvigovich Frank was a proponent of ‘all-unity’, who sought to overcome the polarities in modern thought through a universal philosophical synthesis. Jewish by background, he was drawn to Marxism in his youth; but after some involvement in politics he grew disenchanted with the revolutionary movement. After 1905, he embarked on a career as a professional philosopher. He converted to Orthodoxy in 1912. Following deportation from Russia in 1922 he lived in Germany, France, and Britain. His main works of religious philosophy were written in emigration, although his underlying philosophical outlook was formed before the revolution. Most of the main themes in Christian theology were addressed in his work, even though theology was not his primary focus. Ontological questions were his main preoccupation. He saw his ideas as belonging to the Platonist tradition. His thinking was antinomian; following Nicholas of Cusa, he sought to demonstrate the ‘coincidence of opposites’. There was an apophatic tendency in his work, as well as an experiential emphasis. He saw evil as a kind of non-existent reality. He rejected charges of pantheism. There were echoes of Vladimir Soloviev’s thought in his writings, but this similarity only became clear to him after his philosophical system was formed. His outlook on the church was ecumenical, although he remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. His social philosophy was personalistic and his political thought gradualist; he advocated a kind of Christian realism or humanism while warning against utopianism.

The Philosophical Issues Involved in the War

Philosophy ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 16 (63) ◽  
pp. 242-256
Author(s):  
W. T. Stace
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Rational Ground ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Present World

We are familiar with the statement that the present world-conflagration is, or involves, a struggle between two different philosophies. Obviously the statement is very vague, and it is exceedingly difficult to say exactly what it means. But if it has any meaning at all, a professional philosopher ought to be supremely interested in it. Philosophers are too apt to sit in their ivory towers, weaving curious distinctions and debating strange intellectual puzzles, without any consideration of their implications for humanity. For even the most abstract questions invariably have, in the end, important practical bearings. And we are apt to forget that, in the last analysis, philosophers are the uncrowned rulers of the world. For their ideas, secretly infiltrating among the masses, are among the forces which drive civilizations. Plato has had more influence on the destiny of man than the inventor of the steam engine. And so I make no apology for attempting to discuss here the question whether the two great nations now engaged in war, Germany and Britain, represent any philosophical ideas, what the philosophical issues of the war are, and where, in those issues, the truth, or the greater degree of truth, lies. And the paper will have two parts. In the first I shall try briefly to state what I believe the issues to be. In the second I shall attempt to discover whether there is any rational ground for preferring the philosophy of the one side to that of the other.

Dark Light: The Mystical Theology of St. Edith Stein

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 362-372
Author(s):  
Olli-Pekka Vainio
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Edith Stein ◽  
Dark Light ◽  
The Real ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In this article, I will examine St. Edith Stein’s theory of religious language. Stein, who was both a professional philosopher and a mystic, and deeply rooted both in the tradition of negative theology and early phenomenology, held a peculiar version of univocity with regard to religious language. On the one hand, our concepts have something objectively in common with the thing they signify. On the other hand, our concepts are merely representations of the real. Therefore, when mystics say that God can be addressed “without words or images,” this does not entail anti-realism or non-cognitivism. Instead, according to Stein, this only means that words are not needed when the thing itself is present without mediation in the mystical experience.

Ayer's Place in the History of Philosophy

1991 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Anthony Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
History Of

When A. J. Ayer arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1929 he had no thought of becoming a professional philosopher. He intended to go to the Bar, but, in the manner of an Etonian, by way of Literae Humaniores rather than the study of law. He had read a couple of philosophical books. The first of them was Russell's Sceptical Essays (Russell, 1928), which he bought on its first appearance in 1928. The other was Principia Ethica (Moore, 1903), to which he had been led by a reverent aside in Clive Bell's Art (1914). These choices were significant. Ayer always thought of himself as Russell's successor. He modelled his thought on that of Russell, both in its content and in its unguarded expression and also, to some extent, his manner of life, both political and amorous. What he got from Moore is less obvious, although his respect for Moore is evident, as is shown by the preface to Language, Truth and Logic and by his devoting a book to a close examination of his ideas, along with those of Russell. An important likeness is that both Moore and Ayer were provoked to philosophize by the assertions of other philosophers, not by problems arising outside philosophy in mathematics or the sciences, in history or everyday life.

Mary Warnock

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-92
Author(s):  
Philip Graham
Keyword(s):  
Working Life ◽  
Teaching Quality ◽  
Animal Experimentation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Undergraduate Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
Set Up

Plato's view that we should be ruled by philosophers has never really caught on in Britain. Indeed, in recent years, political attitudes to the study of philosophy have resulted in the closure of departments of philosophy in our universities, so that the subject is less studied at undergraduate level than it was 20 or 30 years ago. So it is surprising that the way our generation thinks about education, genetic experimentation, broadcasting, and some of the other most contentious issues of our time should have been so influenced by a professional philosopher whose working life has never taken her out of Oxford and Cambridge.Mary Warnock has served as chairman of government committees on special education, on animal experimentation, on human fertilisation, and on teaching quality. Further, the recommendations of the committees she has chaired have usually been rapidly adopted by the government of the time and then translated into legislation with bipartisan support and considerable speed. The fate of her reports firmly refutes the commonly held view that governments set up committees to avoid making difficult decisions and then leave their weighty conclusions to sit on shelves, gathering dust until the topics in question have lost the interest of the public.

scholarly journals Goethe and Hegel: The Tninker’s Integrity and the Philosopher’s Systematicity

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-284
Author(s):  
Pavel A. Gorokhov ◽  
Ekaterina R. Yuzhaninova
Keyword(s):  
Human Spirit ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Professional Philosopher

The article discusses the main elements of Goethe’s spiritual influence on Hegel’s philosophical constructions and the influence of the Hegelian system on Goethe’s whole worldview. The views of Goethe and Hegel on history, nature, free human spirit and philosophy itself, as the basis of productive human culture, largely coincided genetically from a single temporal and sociocultural flow. The relations between Goethe and Hegel make it possible to distinguish between the notions of “philosopher” and “thinker”: the so-called “professional” philosopher has a tendency towards systematicity, and with a thinker the systematism develops into integrity.

Hume’s Life and Works

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Republic

This summary account of Hume’s life and works challenges the usual way of telling the story of Hume’s career. It is generally believed that what Hume most wanted to be was a philosopher and that Hume turned to politics and history because that desire was frustrated, principally by the reputation for atheism he had acquired as a result of his writings on religion. The author argues that, from the beginning, Hume was as interested in politics as he was in philosophy; that a career as an independent man of letters, and not as a professional philosopher, was what he most wanted; and that that career was a success, with the History of England its triumphant culmination. Hume’s religious skepticism was no obstacle to his living the life that he most wanted to live, the life of a sophisticated and widely respected citizen of the European republic of letters.

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