Judgment and Action: Fragments Toward a History - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810136317 ISBN 13: 9780810136311

Verlag: NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Written by theologians, literary scholars, political theorists, classicists, and philosophers, the essays in Judgment and Action address the growing sense that certain key concepts in humanistic scholarship have become suspect, if not downright unintelligible, amid the current plethora of critical methods. These essays aim to reassert the normative force of judgment and action, two concepts at the very core of literary analysis, systematic theology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and other disciplines.

Interpretation is essential to every humanistic discipline, and every interpretation is an act of judgment. Yet the work of interpretation and judgment has been called into question by contemporary methods in the humanities, which incline either toward contextual determination of meaning or toward the suspension of judgment altogether. Action is closely related to judgment and interpretation and like them, it has been rendered questionable. An action is not simply the performance of a deed but requires the deed’s intelligibility, which can be secured only through interpretation and judgment.

Organized into four broad themes—interiority/contemplation, ethics, politics/community, and aesthetics/image—the aim of this broad-ranging and insightful collection is to illuminate the histories of judgment and action, identify critical sites from which rethinking them may begin, clarify how they came to be challenged, and relocate them within a broader intellectual-historical trajectory that renders them intelligible. 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

VIVASVAN SONI is an associate professor of English at Northwestern University.

THOMAS PFAU is Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and a professor of German at Duke University, as well as a professor in the Duke Divinity School.

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Judgment and Action

Fragments toward a History

By Vivasvan Soni, Thomas Pfau

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3631-1

Contents

Introduction Vivasvan Soni, 
Part I. Interiority/Contemplation, 
How to Hit Pause: Language, Transcendence, and the Capacity for Judgment in Shaftesbury's "Soliloquy; or, Advice to an Author" Vivasvan Soni, 
"Judge Not" and "Judge for Yourselves" Oliver O'Donovan, 
Stoic Agency and Its Reception Gretchen Reydams-Schils, 
Part II. Ethics, 
How to Be an Agent: Why Character Matters Stanley Hauerwas, 
Losing the Name of Action: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and Speech as Action Sarah Beckwith, 
"The Eyes of Others": Rousseau and Adam Smith on Judgment and Autonomy Hina Nazar, 
Part III. Politics/Community, 
Action as Meaningful Behavior John McGowan, 
The One and the Many in the Philosophy of Action Christopher Yeomans, 
Toward a Democratic Theory of Judgment Linda M. G. Zerilli, 
Part IV. Aesthetics/Image, 
Judging What Cannot Be Judged: The Aporia of Aesthetic Critique Christoph Menke, 
To Make That Judgment: The Pragmatism of Gerhard Richter Florian Klinger, 
Varieties of Nonpropositional Knowledge: Image-Attention-Action Thomas Pfau, 
Appendix. A Broken Vessel, or What It Means to Be an Agent: Stanley Hauerwas on Theology and Practical Reason James Wetzel, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

How to Hit Pause

Language, Transcendence, and the Capacity for Judgment in Shaftesbury's "Soliloquy; or, Advice to an Author"

Vivasvan Soni

Nothing is so improving, nothing so natural, so con-genial to the liberal Arts, as that reigning Liberty and high Spirit of a People, which from the Habit of judging in the highest Matters for themselves, makes 'em freely judg of other Subjects.

— Shaftesbury, "A Letter concerning the Art, or Science of Design"

Soliloquy is a dignified art. Arriving on the scene at times "of great pitch and moment," it pauses the headlong and nearly irresistible flow of dramatic action, allowing the protagonist a chance to muse, reflect, and resolve. Unlike its counterpart in science fiction films, in which time and motion are temporarily frozen as though we had hit pause on the DVD player while the protagonist mutely seeks to alter the course of physical motion in progress, soliloquy achieves its hiatus not through some unexplained technological ingenuity but rather through the simple capacity I have to engage myself in conversation: I pause by speaking. In watching a soliloquy, we are witness to a mind capable of going to work in the world, of intervening reflectively in it, not one that is simply victimized by it or reflexively reacting to it. It is not by accident that Shakespearean drama rises to its philosophical heights at moments of soliloquy, whether it be Hamlet wrestling with the most basic of existential questions or Edmund questioning the arbitrariness of social conventions ("Why bastard?"). Yet soliloquy is also the most palpably artificial of drama's artifices. A theatrical soliloquy is never quite a soliloquy, one alone speaking to herself; the spectators are the addressees of the speech. In the world beyond the theater, where is soliloquizing to be found? Who among us would admit to the practice, much less engage in it in public as theatrical protagonists do? If I see someone talking to themselves on the street, I assume they're talking on a cellphone, else I would worry about their mental health. Prayer is perhaps the everyday practice that comes closest to a form of soliloquizing, but it removes the taint of talking to myself by having a presumed addressee. There is something at once banal, grandiose, and unnerving in the practice of soliloquizing. Yet it is precisely in this peculiar practice that Shaftesbury means to locate a robust and primordial capacity for judgment, against empiricism's threat to render judgment obsolete. What is so remarkable about the ability to talk to myself "vivâ voce" (as Shaftesbury puts it), that it can serve as the practice which will attest to our capacity for judgment? After a brief detour through empiricism, in order to explain why judgment cannot be adequately theorized in that discourse, I will try to discern why Shaftesbury discovers so much promise in soliloquy as a locus for countering the crisis of judgment generated by empiricism.

The great virtue of empiricism is that it insists on explaining phenomena according to the logic of efficient causation. However, such explanations allow no place for judgment, and taken on their own terms, there is no reason they should. While these explanations are valuable for many purposes — indeed, they comprise the entire realm of scientific inquiry as we know it today — they fail to account adequately for the phenomena of human motivation, as Bacon had already recognized: "It is also not bad to distinguish four causes: Material, Formal, Efficient and Final. But of these the Final is a long way from being useful; in fact it actually distorts the sciences except in the case of human actions." In the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke significantly revises his own account of motivation in chapter 2.21 in order to explain it according to the logic of desire and efficient causation. But he also recognizes that this reductive account of motivation is inadequate for explaining crucial aspects of human behavior. He strives without success to develop a more robust space for the practice of judgment, conceiving it as the experientially evident but unaccountable capacity we have to suspend the prosecution of any and all desires (242). Nevertheless, along the way, his attentive phenomenology compels him to acknowledge that basic aspects of cognition, perception, and willing are impossible without judgment. In the absence of the discriminating and constitutive work of judgment, we would be unable to distinguish ideas from one another (chapter 2.11); unable to perceive three spatial dimensions (chapter 2.9); and, above all, unable to constitute the ends that motivate and guide our actions, thereby turning us into the victims of our own desires (chapter 2.21). Despite this acknowledgment of the indispensability of judgment for cognition, however, Locke recognizes that the anarchic fictioning power of judgment threatens to destabilize the empiricist project itself and, by the end of the Essay, he attempts to squeeze judgment to the margins of epistemology, the "twilight zone" of probabilistic knowledge (chapter 4.14). Locke at once created the conditions for a crisis of judgment and provided several openings by which the indispensable role of judgment might be reasserted.

Now, Locke's reductive account of motivation has three separate aspects: the explanation of behavior by desire and efficient causation; the elision of any space for judgment; the refusal to allow agency to ends-oriented thinking. In my story, aesthetic theory, a discourse that is distinctive to the eighteenth century, emerges precisely as a response to the nexus of problems engendered by the reductive account of motivation in empiricism. In particular, some notion of aesthetic disinterest serves as a counter to theories that suggest behavior should be explained only by desire and self-interest (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Kant); and the teleological purposiveness of aesthetic categories like the beautiful, the sublime, and the new serve as a surrogate for the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810136317
• ISBN 13: 9780810136311
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 344
• Herausgeber: Soni Vivasvan, Pfau Thomas
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei