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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Peter FenvesSource: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Jun., 1998), pp. 927-929Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20130312 .

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SUMMARIESNDCOMMENTS 927

ferent description. Spinoza, however, cannot allow these last moves be

cause of the explanatory independence of the physical and the mental.

Put simply, Spinoza assimilates causal and explanatory relations,

whereas Davidson does not (p. 203 n. 30). As a result, Spinoza and

Davidson are monists, identity theorists, of a different stripe.

While the connections with Davidson are shown by Delia Rocca to be

somewhat thin, those that he elicits from Quine and Quine's notion of

the indeterminacy of translation prove more durable. Quinean relativ

ism and the incommensurability of conceptual schemes turn out to be

good analogues to Spinozistic explanatory dualism. To be sure, Spinoza

is no ontological relativist, ? la Quine, but the parallel with Quine is use

ful insofar as both present a strong case for the semantic holism of men

tal content.Delia Rocca has written a challenging book which will force students

of early modern philosophy to read and understand Spinoza and Des

cartes from new, contemporary vantage points. The effort the reader

must make in evaluating Delia Rocca's claims is amply rewarded at the

end.?Daniel H. Frank, University of Kentucky.

Eldridge, Richard, ed. Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic

Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii + 306

pp. Cloth, $49.95?One phrase serves as a point of discussion for much

recent work in a wide variety of scholarly fields: the crisis of representa

tion. Richard Rorty's Philosophy and theMirror of Nature (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1979) has exercised a broad influence in the

humanities because it summarizes a general inclination to declare that

the task of philosophy no longer consists in developing critical theories

of representation that provide sure criteria for distinguishing correct,

well-founded, and good judgments or actions from incorrect, ill

founded, and evil ones. The question then arises: what is the task of philosophy? All the contributions to Richard Eldridge's broadly conceived

collection, Beyond Representation, respond in some manner to this

question by emphasizing the centrality of poi?sis to philosophical in

quiry.

In a lively introduction that both delineates the general motivation for

the volume and indicates the points where individual essays intersect,

Eldridge explains what it means to conceive of philosophy's task in

terms of poi?sis rather than the?ria or praxis: "To think about the hu

man subject in this way, as departing from multiple natural and cultural

interests and endowments, thence actively to refigure representations

and effectively to rearticulate interests, is to conceive of the human sub

ject as a subject of and within poi?sis" (p. 7). For Eldridge, poi?siscannot be understood simply with reference to poetry or even to the

fine arts but, rather, designates all the various activities in which the

given?however it be understood?is transformed and transfigured in

accordance with an aspiration or longing. This conception of poi?sis

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928 ALBERT E. GUNN AND STAFF

leaves wide room for discussion concerning the means of transforma

tion, the modes of transfiguration, and the kinds of aspirations. The vol

ume as a whole bears witness to the fruitfulness of this broad concep

tion of poi?sis.J. M. Bernstein works out a "poetics of action" by a detailed analysis

of confession and forgiveness in Hegel's famous presentation of Anti

gone's conscience and Creon's "hard heart." Drawing on Arendt's re

marks on forgiveness in The Human Condition (Garden City: Double

day, 1959), Bernstein arrives at a conception of philosophy as the

release from the hard heart: "In that release, universality, and judgment,call it philosophy once more, come to have a history and a world that is

their own, a history and world that is Spirit's work of mourning" (p. 62).

Charles Altieri launches a wide-ranging program to forgo aesthetics,aesthetic ideology, and the current critique of aesthetic ideology in favor

of an "expressivist model of articulation" (p. 77) inwhich articulation is

understood as "making visible what it is that one wants to be repre

sented by" (p. 78). In an innovative essay, Samuel Fleischacker com

bines legal theory, Davidson, and Kant to develop a theory of poetic ut

terance in which poetry is shown to be "cognitively valuable, not by

giving us access to a world different from the one of literal utterances

and scientific theory... but by making us attend to the conditions for all

interpretation and theory in this, our familiar and only world" (p. 125).Arthur Danto provides a thoughtful meditation on what constitutes a

distinctive voice in philosophy. Danto points out that those contempo

rary philosophers who are recognizable not only for their arguments but

for their voices are allowed to speak in their own voices because they

do not have to submit their work to the impersonality of blind submis

sion. This attention to the process of publication is a welcome reminder

that philosophical writing does not take place in a vacuum: the institu

tion of blind reviewing fosters the "suppression of our facticities" and

"results in a distorted representation of the world, the world accordingto Nobody" (p. 104).

Many of the other essays in the collection are principally concerned

with one of the areas in which philosophy and poi?sis have alwaysbeen entangled: romanticism. Eldridge shows the degree to which one

of H?lderlin's poems ("Dichterberuf") conforms to Kant's aspirationsfor a peaceful but not complacent humanity. Azade Seyhan gives an in

triguing analysis of Schlegel's theory of the fragment in light of current

work on fractal geometry. Both Michael Fischer and Kenneth Johnston

provide careful reassessments of poetic production and reception,

philosophical reflection, and political action in Wordsworth and Col

eridge. Catherine Battersby opens a new dimension to the argument she

pursues in Gender and Genius (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1989) by analyzing Mary Coleridge's poem "The Other Side of the Mir

ror" with respect to Irigaray's reading of Plato's myth of the cave. Many

of the essays that touch on romanticism make use of Philippe Lacoue

Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of early German

romanticism, The Literary Absolute (trans. P. Barnard and L. Lester [Al

bany: SUNY Press, 1988]). So it is with good reason that the volume

closes with a remarkable exchange of letters between Lacoue-Labarthe

and Nancy that takes its point of departure from the idea of "staging"

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SUMMARIESNDCOMMENTS 929

(opsis, mise en sc?ne) in Aristotle's Poetics. Originally published in a

psychoanalytic journal, this letter exchange not only serves as excellent

introduction to their thought but also allows readers who are familiarwith their collaborative efforts to understand some of the reasons theyno longer tend to publish together. They both accept that art is some

thing other than representation, but they diverge in their interpretationsof this otherness. They stage a "scene": Lacoue-Labarthe takes the side

of sobriety in art, Nancy the side of ecstasis. Together, they, like the

others in the volume, demonstrate what poi?sis might mean "beyond

representation."?Peter Fenves, Northwestern University.

Griffin, James. Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1996. xii + 180 pp. Cloth, $29.95?Griffin's

methodological approach to his project of improving ethical beliefs is

"to refocus attention on [the lost Classical concern for] the good life;"and ". . . then to reflect on how sound our judgements about it are" (p.

67).That ethics is about the "good life" implies that there is no strong ana

logue in ethics to science's goal of an explanatory system (p. 15). Con

ceptions of the good life are not derived directly from (verifiable) per

ceptual input, nor do heterogeneous ethical beliefs presume the

functional unity of the natural world which underlies science's goal of

systematic explanation (p. 124). Thus, Griffin's goal is not to justify a

whole set of beliefs, but to discover a restricted set of highly reliable be

liefs?"either high relative to other beliefs or high on some absolute

scale of security of beliefs" (p. 17)?by which to assess competingmoral beliefs. In this manner, we can ultimately "reflect on how sound

our judgements about [the good life] are" (p. 67).

However, Griffin does not completely abandon the physical analogue.

Instead,he

expandsnaturalism into a

hierarchyof

explanatory theoriesfor increasingly complex levels of phenomena (pp. 49 and following).He then introduces a level that relies upon such classical concepts as

human nature, human interests, and human agency to offer a "best ex

planation" (pp. 49, 62-3) for the convergence of ethical beliefs, espe

cially when a corresponding convergence of socioeconomic and psy

chological factors is absent. Therefore, a standard of correctness mightbe found for some "core values" that are allied to and/or contribute to

the intelligibility of human interests found within this explanatory level

(pp. 52 and following).In order to locate such core values, Griffin begins with prudential val

ues because not only do they refer to the good life?prudential valuesare what "makes life good for the person living it" (p. 19)?they are also

less controversially tied to human interests. A prudential value judgment is "about what meets or fails to meet basic human interests" (p.

14). Thus, by identifying basic human interests, we can also delineatesome possible candidates for core values, such as "avoiding pain" and