A dense, difficult, magisterial exploration of the "dream of
reason." Rosen is a professor of philosophy and fellow of Penn
State's Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, and in this
formidable piece of scholarship he sums up his published work of
the past 20 years. He considers contemporary analytical philosophy
to be a "decayed epiphenomenon" of a perennial (and destructive)
effort to reduce the world to a concept. The ideal of purely
objective analysis is a delusion because there is no way to reify
subjectivity, to make a clean separation between the knower and the
known. Analytical thinking, Rosen argues, is necessarily "saturated
with intuition." To deny this crucial fact, as does, for example,
W. V. O. Quine, is to fail to understand the limits of analysis.
And such a failure must lead to the deterioration of analytical
philosophy, which Rosen otherwise strongly supports, in a
"crescendo of technical frenzy." In making his case Rosen ranges
far and wide through the history of philosophy, ancient and modern,
from Plato to Saul Kripke. His discussion of Nietzsche is
particularly acute. Rosen sees Nietzsche as the bitter end of the
Enlightenment's essentially athetistic desire to master nature.
Nietzsche rejects the intuitive Platonic universe of
pre-established mathematical structures as an intolerable
restriction on human creativity. The world is a valueless chaos,
out of which man, creating ex nihilo, has to fashion a new cosmos.
Truth in this view has no meta-linguistic status, an idea is true
to the extent that the thinker's will can make it true. This
equation of value with desire links Nietzsche with 20th-century
rationalists: for both "it is literally senseless to look for the
meaning of human life in a source external to it." And thus
Nietzsche's heroic but, to Rosen, unsuccessful attempt to come to
grips with nothingness suggests some of the dangers inherent in the
analytic project of self-contained reason. In his Preface Rosen
voices the hope that his book will be of interest to reflective
individuals and not just professional philosophers. The layman, if
he tackles it, will find his hands full - some academic background
is indispensable here - but he can't help being enriched by this
stimulating and persuasive book. (Kirkus Reviews)
Philosophy in the twentieth century has been dominated by the urge
for analysis, a methodology that is supposed to be comparable in
clarity and correctness to scientific thought. In this brilliant
and devastating attack on such exaggerated claims, Stanley Rosen
demonstrates how analysis alone lacks the power to approach the
deepest and most important philosophical questions. He thus
provides us with a new and deeper understanding of the nature and
limits of analytic thinking.
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