THE LIMITS OF ANALYSIS

by Stanley Rosen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 28, 1980

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.

Pub Date: May 28, 1980

ISBN: 1890318361

Page Count: -

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION