Toward A New Foundationalism From Carnap To Kripke And From Husserl To Sallis Bernard Freydberg by Bernard Freydberg 9781527562059, 1527562050 instant download after payment.

Just as each of my previous books was motivated by a perceived lack in the philosophical literature, so too is this one. However, the lack it seeks to remedy is more general. It cuts across the majority of both major Anglo-American and Continental thought. One seeks in vain for work affirming the presence of a governing foundation, a Grund, that pervades the whole either explicitly or implicitly. The explanation for this lies at hand: metaphysics is out of favor. Rather, most contemporary philosophy takes it for granted that late-19thcentury philosophy, continuing into the 20th century and beyond, sounded the death knell for metaphysics. The reasons for this differ dramatically between the two major strains, and even within them. The outcome, it seems to me, consists of an often overconfident and almost always false wisdom. It also seems to me that foundations are tacitly presupposed, even in the most vigorous denunciations of them. In other words, we have outsmarted ourselves and have replaced the innocence that remains so basic to philosophy with an injudicious sophistication. I do not fault the work of those most influential thinkers that challenged the traditional authority of metaphysics. To the contrary, they have done philosophy a great service. While I believe that their specific critiques of our canonical Western thinkers are rarely as decisive as they suppose, their responsiveness to apparently countervailing developments and the individual genius of some of their cohort have both advanced the level of discourse and reshaped our relationship to the pursuit of wisdom as such.