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• Title: Openness to Contingency: Huckleberry Finn and the Morality of Phronesis.
• Author : Studies in the Humanities
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Reference,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 360 KB

Description

Gerald Bruns' book, Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory, makes some compelling claims about the philosophical climate of our time. Drawing mainly on Stanley Cavell, but also on philosophers as diverse as Levinas, Nussbaum, and Gadamer, Bruns claims that we have indeed come to the "end of philosophy," where the key questions of the day are not "What do we know and how do we know?", but "How can we relate to things besides just knowing them?" (Bruns 14). (1) For Bruns, one of the pivotal thinkers to show how philosophy has moved beyond epistemology is Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose dialogical model of reading extols the value of openness. Bruns states that this openness is "not the open-mindedness of liberal pluralism," but an "exposure to the other, in which our self-possession, or say our existence, is at stake" (195). This is reading "without epistemology" (2)--reading not for knowledge of a text, but as an act of self-questioning. In this model, understanding a text is more than just knowing what it says, it's also knowing "what it asks of us" (196). Though Gadamer isn't primarily regarded as an ethical philosopher, his philosophical hermeneutics can have significant implications for ethical philosophy, as Bruns' application of Gadamer demonstrates. Furthermore, Gadamer seems to invite such applications of his hermeneutics to ethics in his discussions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, found in Truth and Method and elsewhere in his work. (3) One of Gadamer's most provocative uses of Aristotle is in his resurrection of the terms phronesis and techne. (4) Phronesis can be translated as "practical wisdom" or "wisdom in action," (Ostwald 312) and it designates behavior that is good in itself, means and ends undivided. Techne, on the other hand, is a term taken from the kind of knowledge artisans use to construct an object according to a predetermined plan. It designates an action that has a predetermined end in view--the means separated from the ends. With phronesis, a right-minded person will grasp the situation at hand and act in the right way, without any predetermined idea in mind, such as "Will this action pay-off for me?" or even, "Does this action correspond to what is right, categorically?" For Gadamer, the concept of phronesis is important for understanding interpretation as a complex task for which predetermined rules are never adequate. Similarly, for Aristotle the moral universe is too complex to be navigated with preset rules; thus a "technical" morality will never be adequate to meet the most difficult moral challenges. For both Gadamer and Aristotle, the key to practical wisdom is openness. One must be open to the possibilities of the text, or to the person next to you, or to the difficulties of the situation at hand, if one is to adequately interpret the situation and decide what must be done. Where a morality of techne seals itself off in order to follow a set of rules, a morality of phronesis remains open to new, unthought of possibilities.

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