Papers by Richard T Eldridge
D escribing the ambition of ordinary language philosophy and taking it as his own, Stanley Cavell... more D escribing the ambition of ordinary language philosophy and taking it as his own, Stanley Cavell remarks that the ordinary language philosopher's "problem [in proceeding from what is ordinarily said] is to discover the specific plight of mind and circumstance within which a human being gives voice to his condition."' This ambition can be variously pursued in autobiographical writing, in poetry, and in criticism, as well as in ordinary language philosophy. One way to pursue it would be to arrive, or to claim to arrive, at a final discovery of the human condition: to announce, for example, that we are immortal souls capable of eternal knowledge, in substantial union with a mortal, material body; or that we are nothing but congeries of atoms,-or that we are made in the image of a God of justice and love, thence to take one's bearings from that announcement. This is roughly the way of dogmatic philosophy, in seeking final results-^ultimate characterizations of our condition, vouchsafed to us from an encounter with the dictates of reason alone, or with reality as such, material or divine, as the case may be. One does not have to be a hyperbolic skeptic to be suspicious of this ambi tion, articulated and worked out in this way. What are the criteria of an encounter with reason or reality alone? How might any such announcement, even to oneself, be trusted? But there is another, more distinctly critical way to follow this ambition, proceeding, as it were, from within the continual having of it. This latter way eschews the ultimacy of any discovery of our condition in favor of tracingand sharing in-swerves between self-composure and self-abandonment on an eccentric path: as though one found oneself along with other human beings whose expressions of their plight one might read as neighbors to one's own, always in medias res between nothingness and at-homeness with oneself, others, and the world, in living composedly according to reason and the nature of things. Here the ambition to discover our condition so as to take one's bearings persists, but this
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2008
From roughly 1600 to 1800, a new form of subjectivity developed in Europe. As a result of develop... more From roughly 1600 to 1800, a new form of subjectivity developed in Europe. As a result of developments in science, technology and political economy, subjects-first a small minority an then an increasingly large sector of the bourgeoise-began to sense new possi bilities of leading independent lives, with shapes determined fi'om their own inner resources. As subjects began to accord greater and greater importance to their individual thoughts, feel ings, Md sensibilities, courses of life came to be seen as properly determined less and less by heredity and class membership and more and more by fi-ee personality. At the same time, however, the experience of the possibility and value of a ^Fe of fre^ persoflality was fi^ighted with anxieties and uncertainties about how really to get on with life and about what one's so cial reception and place might be.
Philosophy and Literature, 1984
University of California Press eBooks, Apr 28, 2023
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1988
An academic directory and search engine.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 14, 2022
Literature, Life, and Modernity, 2008
Studies in Romanticism, 1991
... Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953-On moral personhood : philosophy, literature, criticism, and s... more ... Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953-On moral personhood : philosophy, literature, criticism, and self-understanding / Richard Eldridge. ... work on Conrad at Bucknell University, where I must thankRichard Flem-ing ... philosophyends in a kind of failure.2 Reason doesn't prove what ...
Combinatorics on Words, 1997
Conversations, Mar 3, 2022
Here is a passage from the discussion of rhythm in music in Hegel's Aesthetics that will, I sugge... more Here is a passage from the discussion of rhythm in music in Hegel's Aesthetics that will, I suggest, help us to make sense of some important ideas in Cavell about the achievement of selfhood. This runs some risk of explicating the obscure, Cavell, by 1 reference to the unintelligible, Hegel, but Hegel also helps us here specifically to focus on the ontology and ontogeny of selfhood. The I is not indeterminate persistence and uninterrupted duration, but rather only becomes a self as collection and return into itself [als Sammlung und Rückkehr in sich]. It transforms this sublation of itself, through which it be
Uploads
Papers by Richard T Eldridge