Philosophy and Religion
- Knowledge and Politics
- Passion: An Essay
- A Letter
- Nature in its Place
- The Universal Grid of Philosophy
- Science and Politics between Domesticated and Radicalized Pragmatism
- Tanner Lectures: The Future of Religion and the Religion of the Future - New
My first book. A philosophical study of a dominant set of ideas about personality and society,
contrasted with a view I offer in substitution. A postscript in subsequent printings of the book summarizes how I later came
to judge its argument.
A philosophical discussion of the experience and the ideal of personality. It argues for a revision of our dominant Christian-romantic
view of the person as well as of our beliefs about how to live. It explores the ideas about selfhood that accompany my ideas about society.
This little piece, which will appear as an appendix to "The Self Awakened," restates and develops one of my central concerns -- the idea that we are something infinite imprisoned within something finite -- from the vantage point of a question unaddressed in my earlier work: our relation to nature. In asking what we should do with nature, we ask what we should do with ourselves.
This brief text, also to appear as an appendix to "The Self Awakened," discusses what is and is not constant in the world history of philosophy. Metaphysics remains imprisoned in a labyrinth from which it cannot escape, not even through its attempted partnership with natural science. The moral and political ideas of humanity have, however, undergone a revolution. As a result of this revolution we discover that although we are not God we can become more godlike.
This article is the outcome of a discussion with philosophers of science and works out some of the assumptions about thinking on which my recent work in social theory relies. This little essay also attacks the diminished and servile version of pragmatism that threatens to become the ruling philosophy of the age. The essay was originally published in Science in Context 10, 1 (1997), introducing a collection of papers in most of which I discerned the domesticated pragmatism I combat; hence the reference to these papers in the first paragraph.
|