Philosophy Books for Literature Students

It is a familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and further in the course of our century. It originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems, and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism (for example, Dryden’s, Shelley’s, Arnold’s, and Eliot’s prose, as well as their verse). Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. …

Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism. But for accidental historical reasons, having to do with the way in which intellectuals got jobs in the universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties, the name has stuck. So instead of changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,” we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. A literary critic in what T. J. Clarke has called the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of New York in the ’30s and ’40s was expected to have read the The Revolution Betrayed and The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as The Wasteland, Man’s Hope, and An American Tragedy. In the present Orwellian-Bloomian culture she is expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important. The application of this term has nothing to do with presence of “literary qualities” in a book. Rather than detecting and expounding such qualities, the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased – or, where necessary, sharpened. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 81-2)

Whatever the specifics of Rorty’s picture of what a literary critic is today (I say this partly because Rorty was reflecting on this at the end of the ’80s), the historical picture he sketches in the first paragraph is roughly what happened and gets at the consequences we still deal with. Because of further reactions to the “Orwellian-Bloomian culture,” the present state of becoming professionalized in an English department has become even more complicated, as the addition of what we call “New Historicism” and “cultural studies” adds even more kinds of possible books to be familiar with (such as adding “history” to Rorty’s list, which is all I think New Historicism amounts to, their protests to the contrary). This creates a frenetically anxious environment for the would-be practitioner, just coming through the door wanting to learn what’s what. By the mid-’70s, Said was already describing the situation as “less background, less formal training, less prescribed and systematic information, is assumed before one begins to read, write, or work. Thus when one begins to write today one is necessarily more of an autodidact, gathering or making up the knowledge one needs in the course of creating. The influence of the past appears less useful and, as two recent critics, W. J. Bate and Harold Bloom, have argued, more likely to produce anxiety” (Said, Beginnings, 8).

That’s only kind of what Bate and Bloom meant, and perhaps Said’s somewhat sunny slant on being the autodidact is because he was already so well-learned. The past isn’t “more likely to produce anxiety,” it just does—and particularly when you have less background, less training, and no systematically arranged information to peruse. The situation of the young literature student starting out is similar to that of the amateur philosopher—both are autodidacts, with many avenues of thought that could be pursued, which presents both the freedom and the dilemma: I can only go one way at a time, so which shall it be? Given the limits of time and energy, you don’t want to waste your time. But, too, Rorty’s pragmatic sensibility reminds you that at some point, you’re going to want to get a job doing this, which means you’re going to need to fake knowing something. Every tenured professor has a youthful story about a book that everyone else around them seems to have read but that they didn’t learn about until later. The goal of every student looking into the future is to minimize the length of that list of books.

It is in this situation that I make the following short list. The American education system does not prepare a young student very well to pursue philosophy, and it does this by slighting a historical background in the major thinkers. As a matter of cultural conversation, it doesn’t help to know that they were mainly white men who are now dead—if everyone assumes you know something about them, then you’d better know something about them. Who this unidentified “everyone” is, however, has been shrinking, at least in the United States. The fact is that after the ’60s and ’70s, if you were a budding literary critic, it’s quite probable that you read some Continental philosophy, like Derrida or Foucault or Lacan, because that was hot in those days. The trouble for us now is that it isn’t so hot: which means you are much more likely an autodidact trying to pick it up by yourself.

What makes Continental philosophy difficult is that their frame of reference is often either the history of philosophy or really weird descriptions of “common experience” (think: Being and Nothingness or Being and Time). The latter can be very useful in an ad hoc way, but it’s difficult to feel like you’re getting in the middle of a conversation because Continental philosophers often don’t talk to each other, but rather to the major figures of the past. And if you don’t know how to negotiate through those old figures, you can get lost pretty quick. The only way to get through that problem is to learn something about the past. But, as Said pointed out, there are no how-to manuals lying around. And on top of that, the philosophers who speak your language are nattering on to almost exclusively each other about problems only they (so they say) find interesting—this is why no one knows anything about Anglo-American philosophy either.

The list below is to help with getting into the Anglo-American conversation, to find an entry point into their conversation (unless you already understand Derrida, in which case go to Samuel Wheeler’s Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy). There’s no particular reason why one would need to, but the anglophone philosophical conversation does have some distinctive things it does better and there is the added bonus of knowing something no one else knows (distinguishability is a valuable intellectual-market commodity). In addition, if you want to know more about the Big Dead Guys, you can’t read just any English-speaker’s introductory version, because they often won’t tell you anything relevant to the way the Continental philosophers are talking about them. (Exemplary exception: Robert Solomon’s Continental Philosophy Since 1750. And also, though a Frenchman, Vincent Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy is a brilliant discussion of the Continental mid-century ferment.) And that’s just what a growing intellectual needs: coin to make your way between disciplines, not burrowing into one extra discipline that might never come in handy. Said’s literary critic as quasi-autodidact is very much right insofar as the problems that a student will become immersed in and seek to solve might take them in any number of directions, and the trick is to be able to very quickly sink into a pile of research without getting lost and going the wrong direction (the problem of the red herring).

What makes the list below what it is is that 1) each philosopher was important at some point to the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, 2) the books in some way recapitulate facets of those conversations, 3) they are also about much bigger fish than those narrow conversations, 4) they are very well-schooled in the history of philosophy and the books enter into that larger sequence, and 5) they all have an eye towards an even larger intellectual conversation that, for example, includes literature. Because of those 5 things, the list below is designed to not waste a literature student’s time.

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre—One of the most important books of moral philosophy in the last 50 years, this was MacIntyre’s first extended attempt to link together work in epistemology, philosophy of action, and the fate of our moral and political cultures. And while disagreement with some of its central claims is almost necessary for anyone who doesn’t think God is a necessary presupposition, it is a fascinating tour de force that takes you through the Greeks and the Enlightenment on the composition of communities. In order to get past the notion that Lyotardian postmodernism means the death of continuity and the birth of free-wheeling relativism, one needs a working notion of tradition and practices. MacIntyre offers an excellent version here, while at the same time arguing (as Marxists will love) that liberalism is still undermining their composition. One interesting facet of the book is his treatment of Jane Austen as a moral philosopher.

Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor—Taylor’s book might be an even larger story with a similar perspective as MacIntyre’s, though their titles effectively give you each of their focuses. Taylor’s story is especially important given the kind of sophistication literature students are to show in handling a “character” as a locus of selfhood—for if a character has a self, it might be useful to know how our notions of what a self is have evolved (and thus plunk an author in their own historical milieu). This was a major entry into the debates about “modernity” (even if I think that word is overused), just as Taylor’s recent A Secular Age is a major entry into the somehow still-ongoing debates about secularization. Taylor and MacIntyre were two major thinkers identified as “communitarians”—the position you get when you want to throw away the worst of Marx and keep the best of Hegel. Hegel’s “beautiful soul” is (with good reason) hot right now, and that description of the Romantic self perfectly complements Taylor’s story, which engages heavily with literary traditions, particularly poetry.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Bernard Williams—this book is largely supposed to be about ethics and political philosophy, but it is something like a comprehensive system inasmuch as Williams situates it within a set of relationships with philosophical neighbors like the philosophy of science and of language. The chapters on their interrelations are some of the best of its kind. Williams also has a historical depth of understanding that is nearly matchless, and his unique ability is to distill the past into its heritage for us today without harming it. Transforming the past into a set of problems to be negotiated is an excellent way to make the actual reading of Plato’s Republic or Kant’s Critiques not just a haze of bare understanding of what’s going on.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty—while MacIntyre’s book distills his earlier work on the philosophy of the social sciences and of action and Williams his work on science and language, they don’t go into extraordinary detail on those conversations. Rorty’s book is, by itself, the most comprehensive recapitulation of the minute details of the “core subjects” of the first 100 years of analytic philosophy available (roughly, 1880 to 1980—Frege to Davidson). It is beautifully Hegelian in its ability to tell a progressive story about how one philosophical position was transumed by the next up to this present (late ’70s) moment. Even if disagreeable in its conclusions, its ability to lay bare the reasons for one position against another is the ideal starting point to understanding what philosophers of language and of mind are going on about. It also situates these smaller conversations into a larger story stretching back to the Greeks and makes inroads to connecting the anglophone conversation with the Continental one.

Must We Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell—if it was difficult to choose one book from the array of useful and powerful books from each of the previous authors’ storehouse (it being very difficult not to choose Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), it was particularly difficult to choose which Cavell book to single out. However, given my commitment to the utility of the book to introduce an autodidact into the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, I chose this book on the basis of each essay’s sterling compactness on an array of relevant issues. The Claim of Reason was difficult not to choose, but Cavell’s discussions of Austin, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics and his general performance in the vein of “ordinary language philosophy” (while offering penetrating insight into what the hell that is) are perfect introductions to their subjects and the occasional weirdness of his later work.

Those are my five suggestions, five being a nice round number, though now I will indulge in four more that more or less fail in the “introduction to anglophone conversation” criterion. These are just brilliant.

The Art of Living by Alexander Nehamas—Nehamas is the most eminent philosophical scholar (a philosopher, not a classicist) of Socrates and Plato living today. This book is, actually, an excellent introduction into a host of scholarly problems about reading Plato, with dense endnotes. Its brilliance, however, is in its humane rendering of what the “philosophical life” is, beginning with the impact of Socrates as a figure in the mind of the philosopher. What follows are amazing discussions of silence, discussion, arête, knowledge, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault and, above all, irony. If you work anywhere in the vicinity of the trope of irony, you cannot afford to pass up this book.

The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch—this book is worth getting just for its first essay. Murdoch was a novelist in addition to a philosopher, and she was also a Platonist. Every single person on my list is, in an important (and delimited) sense, an anti-Platonist. So what gives? To my mind, Murdoch offers one of the best, distilled accounts of the problem of the modern notion of the self taken for granted by early liberal theory. In my favorite phrase of hers, it is “a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.” And while Brandom’s Kant, Cavell’s Wittgenstein, and Lear’s Freud should all be friends of ours, Murdoch points out a pressing problem at that stage of the conversation, and in its face presents an excellent discussion of the pressure of context in ethical decision-making. She puts it in Platonic terms of sight, of “contexts of attention,” but its ancestor, I should say, is rather E. M. Forster. For literary critics who want a good illustration of what a “literary point of view” might be as giving a distinct angle on a philosophical topic, there is nothing better than this very short book.

Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar—if much good moral philosophy these days is “virtue-centered” in its approach (in contradistinction to a Kantian-style search for principles), then Shklar offers an extraordinary meditation on its darker flipside (much as she does for liberal discussion of justice in The Faces of Injustice). Shklar moves easily back and forth between contemporary practical problems (international, domestic, personal), theoretical problems, history both social and intellectual, and sources of our moral thinking as diverse Machiavelli, Montaigne, Christianity, James Madison, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Hawthorne.

Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman—if Rorty offers a narrative of what he even puts in scare quotes as the “core subjects” of anglophone philosophy, then Susan Neiman offers a tremendous narrative of the history of modern moral philosophy, which she argues was actually at the core (at least at its early stage in the 18th century). Ranging from close readings of Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Bayle, Voltaire, Freud, and a really interesting one on the Marquis de Sade, Neiman’s story centers on the importance, in particular, of two world-historical events that have shaped in sometimes subtle ways thinking about evil: the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 and the holocaust at Auschwitz. Her understanding of how our thinking about moral responsibility and the sources of evil have changed and might yet still change (with a short, speculative section on September 11) is penetrating and well-worth thinking about.

Morton and Metaphysics

Timothy Morton's recent book, Ecology without Nature, is an interesting, provocative meditation on the notion of nature in writing--and since all "notions" are conceptual, articulated things, nature, when when we talk about it, is always, in an attenuated sense, "in writing." Morton's book is broken into three massive chapters. The first is required reading for anybody working with nature-writing: Pirsig, Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, whoever. The most important portion is a very astute itemizing of rhetorical techniques, what he calls an "ambient poetics," and what they are usually doing for these kinds of writers. Morton calls nature-writing "ecomimesis," which from its Greek roots would mean "imitation of the home." Just playing around with his terminology can yield interesting insights, even if you for the most part ignore everything else.

Which is what I would like to do to large swaths of his book. A lot of it, so it seems to me, is mired in fancy Derridean clothing that, while not tanking his unique perspective (as it totally would of a lesser critic), is quickly becoming out-dated. What I wrote below tries to bring out what that is.

Even as that is so, the second chapter is an attempt to link Romantic poetry, the Romantic ethos, the consumerist ethos, economics and our ethical thinking about nature. And while certain aspects are still too marxist for me to take seriously (which is to say, once you shuck the marxist vocabulary that requires a platonic method to constitute, the sentence loses its polemical point and so any utility at all), Morton has written previously on a much larger scale about only that subject, and some of the things briefly stated in this book are interesting and plausible. I can't wait for the day that our cultural-studies thinking forgets about marxism so that it can really spread its wings. The third chapter is a looser cavalcade of speculative, philosophical thinking about how we might "represent" (the modern translation of mimesis) nature. There are some interesting bits, to be sure, but reading Stanley Cavell (like this chapter from In Quest of the Ordinary) is probably a more productive use of time.

References are to:
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2007

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Near the center of his book, Morton makes this statement about the center of his book: “Ambience is really an externalized form of the beautiful soul. Without doubt, the discovery of the beautiful soul as the form of ecological consumerism is the most important concept in this book” (121). The difficult equivocation tucked into this statement is between “ambience as the rhetoric of talking about ‘the outside’” and “ambience as an historical construction.” Much of Chapter 1, which is given over to the discussion of ecomimesis and the poetics of ambience, reads like a manual for how to achieve the effect of there being an environment in one’s writing. However, granting that “strong ecomimesis” is “distinct and modern” (32, 33), Morton still spends most of the book talking about just how inescapable this rhetoric is while at the same time speaking of it as historically arising out of particular circumstances. But if the beautiful soul is a peculiar moment in the unfolding of the Western Geist, as Hegel thought and Morton following a Marxist brand thinks, it is unclear how ambience in general could be the externalized form of this particular historical construct, though it is clear how that being the case could make the beautiful soul look nearly inescapable.

One of the virtues of Morton’s book is his elaboration of a poetics of ambience, of the rhetoric of inside/outside. Its main vice is its assumption of the inescapability of metaphysics. Take Morton’s elaboration of the Derridean notion of the “re-mark,” which he takes to be the fundamental mark of ambience. He says, “there is nothing underneath the wave/particle distinction. The same is true of the re-mark. Either the inside/outside distinction is constituted, or not” (50). The analogy is perfect for his purposes, but on elaborating this point again at the close of the chapter, Morton immediately follows with “Not that the distinction is real; it is entirely spurious” (78). What could this mean? For a distinction to be an illusion, there would have to be a reality to the situation that you could then elaborate, but Morton expressly says that there is “nothing underneath” the distinction.

This curious equivocation is repeated in a similar way in Chapter 2, which is a recrossing of Marx back with Hegel to read the phenomenon of Romanticism. Morton suggests that Hegel's notion of the beautiful soul is an amping up of a picture of the mind that Morton calls “the ideology of consumer capitalism”—“the mind is like a supermarket and … our consciousness floats, with free choice, among various ideas that can be selected at will, like so many different bottles of shampoo or magazines” (126). This is an excellent description, as is his articulation of the beautiful soul as, in summary, one who values “transformative experiences” qua transformative experiences (111), whose “purpose is to have no purpose” (112) because the point is not what you are transformed into (the eschewal of content), but the transformation itself (the form). And though elitist Baudelaire-types (Romantic poets, bohemians, hipsters, etc.) realize self-consciously this lebensform, every mindless repetition of “supermarket consumption” reinforces the self-conscious form’s possibility of flowering by emphasizing how every act of “free choice” of this or that bottle of shampoo is but an abstract emblem for one thing: Free Choice. This drains the content leaving only the form (that which lies behind, e.g., the post-9/11 idea that if you don’t buy stuff at the mall, the terrorists will win).

So far a good bit of cultural criticism. However, “ideology” as a term can only receive its utility from a contrast with something else, if not Marxian “science,” then at the very least some other ideological form (taking “ideology” in a very neutral, descriptive sense). So on the one hand we have the ideology of consumer capitalism’s picture of the mind as an empty consciousness floating around making “free choices”—but what is the alternative? Morton nowhere comes close to suggesting that he wishes to revamp a Marxist-like notion of “science” or any other kind of epistemological method with which to pierce behind the veil of appearances to reality, yet he says—in a constant motif of avoiding anything smacking of the “new and improved”—“these ‘new and improved’ versions of identity never entirely get rid of the paradoxes of the idea of self from which they deviate” (176). Morton doesn’t think we can have a new picture of the self: “We cannot come up with a ‘new and improved’ version of identity that will do without the paradoxes and aporias associated with it” (182). And yet it is not at all clear why not. One could grab Iris Murdoch at random from a bag full of anti-Kantians (Richard Rorty, Annette Baier, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre) and it would be easy to show that not only does Murdoch identify the trouble with what we might call modernity its picture of an empty self (blaming it largely, though perhaps in the long-run unfairly, on Wittgenstein), but that she feels quite content in elaborating a picture of a non-empty self. What is unclear is not only how her picture of the substantial self catches itself up in Cartesian paradoxes and aporias, but more especially how it wouldn’t only improve Morton’s picture of an ecology without nature.[fn.1]

To help substantiate this, I would point to Morton’s approving mention of the “Western Apache’s use of narrative in the naming of places,” where “there is no difference between a place and the socially reproving and improving stories that the Apache associate with it, and thus, there is no nature” (180). Compare this to Rorty’s extrapolation of Daniel Dennett’s picture of the self as a “center of narrative gravity” to the general picture of any object as a center of “descriptive gravity.”[fn.2] In Rorty’s picture of the self, and indeed anything we differentiate as an object (which means putting into the foreground with a background), language is indelibly wrapped up into it. This has caught Rorty a lot of flack in the anglophone philosophical world, but it chimes perfectly with Morton’s appreciation of Derrida’s comments on narcissism, which are echoed when he says, “One cannot help anthropomorphism” (180).[fn.3] Indeed, Morton goes quite far in laying the groundwork for a rapprochement with American pragmatism when, following Marx’s pragmatism (encapsulated best in the “Theses on Feuerbach”), he says, “In order to be sitting by a fire, you have to satisfy certain needs” (181). This in one fell, odd semantical swoop captures the pragmatist point that differentiations come attached to purposes—it wouldn’t be this or that “place” if it weren’t satisfying certain needs, for which the distinction between an object in the foreground against a background is but the tool.

It is at this point that Morton would start making contortions. For one, he says that the possibility of the expansion of sympathy from the human to the nonhuman implied by Derrida’s work on forgiveness seems to imply “that we should treat animals and plants as ends in themselves and not as means. But the paradox is that maintaining this view denatures nature” (180) What isn’t clear is why this is bad—we are replacing one conception of nature for another, are we not? Morton’s Derridean enjoyment of paradox gets in the way of his point. After making the pragmatist point about tools and purposes I elicited earlier, he says “the debate about environment and world—between humans who are able to contemplate their needs aesthetically (with distance), and animals who make do with whatever is around them—is thus a red herring” (181). Morton, who is referring to John McDowell’s book Mind and World, is absolutely right, though I think his point is obscured by his transformation of McDowell. Morton is referring to a section in McDowell’s book where he is intent on elaborating a distinction between “mere sentience” and “second nature,” which humans have. Here’s the key line: “When we acquire conceptual powers, our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems and exploiting opportunities, constituted as such by immediate biological imperatives, but exercising spontaneity, deciding what to think and do” (McDowell 115) The key disagreement between McDowell and Rorty is McDowell’s reinvention of Kant’s notion of spontaneity as different in kind from “coping.” For pragmatists, the purpose behind the deployment of differentiations is coping. McDowell wants a radical difference between what animals do and what humans do. What’s unclear in Morton’s appreciation of the problem is what he could mean by calling this question “profound”: “are animals capable of aesthetic contemplation?” (Morton 181) For McDowell and Rorty, the difference is language and so, in Rorty’s rejection of the distinction between environment and world as a red herring, he would say the question is as profound as the task of figuring out whether the animal is linguistic.[fn.4] So what could it mean to reject the distinction as a red herring and still find the question compelling and profound?

A capsule summary of the background to Morton’s book would be that it assumes that Derrida was correct when he elaborated the notion that philosophy is rhetorical yet rejects rhetoric and that philosophy is inescapable. Morton’s book has the vices of its virtues in this approach—he precisely avoids all those questions in which the Derrida-like unavoidability of paradox might become suspect. This isn’t exactly a criticism, for it would be like criticizing the creator of a new paradigm for spending too much time constructing it—at a certain point you want to stop abusing the blueprints and see what goes up. The oddity of Morton’s experiment, naturally, is in turning deconstruction into a basis for construction, but this simply embodies the paradoxes Morton continually finds rooted and unavoidable at the bottom of every deconstructive investigation. It is this issue of “unavoidable paradox” that should provide a moment of true curiosity for the deconstructive deep-sea diver—for how is the baptism of a paradox into metaphysical unavoidability any different from a Cartesian Archimedean point?[fn.5] Morton teases out paradoxes in the rhetoric of ecology and, rather than getting rid of them, makes them the basis of his constructive project, the way the world is that we must deal with. But how does this not turn deconstruction into a Cartesian method of piercing behind the veil of appearances to reality and not turn Derrida into a foundationalist? The problem is neither paradigm-deconstruction nor paradigm-construction, but rather—as in all major, interesting philosophical difference—picking the wrong assumptions to hold with conviction (in the Greek: dogma) and build off of. This doesn’t “demolish” Morton’s project, of course, which is the true virtue of his book. For as much as his rhetoric against much thinking revolves around the threat that they are seeking the “new and improved” and he is radically not (somehow), it hardly clouds the interesting ideas that pop out.

Endnotes

[1]Murdoch elaborates this view in “The Idea of Perfection” in her The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 2001) (which can also be found in the very representative collection of her essays, Existentialists and Mystics). She says this picture, which she finds behind the behaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian, is a “happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud” (9). Her view of the self is based on emphasizing “contexts of attention” to the process of choice, and of dissolving the notion of a “will” that undergirds Kantian moral philosophy, treating so-called “decisions” as more like “compulsions.” In her attack on the will, she mirrors Williams in his book Shame and Necessity and MacIntyre’s notion of “emotivism” in After Virtue.

[2]This is in his essay “Daniel Dennett on Intrinsicality,” particularly 105-110, of his Truth and Progress (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[3]For further remarks along this line on anthropomorphism with respect to animals (particularly my reference to Snell), see "The Representation of Animals."

[4]Rorty's most illustrious student, and McDowell's long-time colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Brandom, has also reconstituted Kant's shadow in the face of Rorty's long-standing battle with it (since "The World Well Lost"). While McDowell tries to breathe life into Kant's notion of "spontaneity" (which Rorty comments on in a 1998 article in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), Brandom breathes fascinating life into Kant's notion of the "unity of apperception" (in the first chapter of his 2009 Reason in Philosophy). The difference between McDowell and Brandom, and why Rorty would have endorsed Brandom's version of Kant, is that McDowell tries to make an ontological distinction between "mere sentience" and the "second nature" of language. Brandom, on the other hand, takes Rorty's Davidsonian point and works further from there to show just what the addition of language does entail to our difference from animals, for the move from sentience to sapience. This point is most stunningly worked out in the last chapter of that book, "How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science," where Brandom reverses Rorty's long (long) standing notion that philosophy does not make progress by showing (and convincing even me) that philosophy, indeed, does show results that other disciplines might want to bone up on.

[5]For a little more on metaphysical baptism, see closing two paragraphs of "Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience."