Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory
Subtitle: Appropriating Historical Traditions
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: December 1993
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780822313229
Subjects: Cultural studies; Topics in philosophy; General; Literary Studies/American Lite; paper; History - General History; History; Imagination (Philosophy); Philosophy
Description: Does philosophy have a future? Postmodern thought, with its rejection of claims to absolute truth or moral objectivity, would seem to put the philosophical enterprise in jeopardy. In this volume some of today's most influential thinkers face the question of philosophy's future and find an answer in its past. Their efforts show how historical traditions are currently being appropriated by philosophy, how some of the most provocative questions confronted by philosophers are given their impetus and direction by cultural memory. Unlike analytic philosophy, a discipline supposedly liberated from any manifestation of cultural memory, the movement represented by these essays demonstrates how the inquiries, narratives, traditions, and events of our cultural past can mediate some of the most interesting exercises of the present-day philosophical imagination. Attesting to the power of historical tradition to enhance and redirect the prospects of philosophy these essays exemplify a new mode of doing philosophy- Publisher description.