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ID:
090840
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Criticisms of Quentin Skinner's approach to the study of the history of political thought have generally failed to directly address the philosophical presuppositions on which Skinner himself relies. Those presuppositions involve, primarily, theories of language associated most closely with Austin, Searle, and Grice. An investigation of the uses that Skinner makes of philosophical pragmatics raises serious doubts about a number of his central claims. Moreover, those philosophical resources actually point toward a decidedly non-Skinnerian approach that focuses not primarily on discovering or reconstructing historical circumstances, but on uncovering and explicating structures of argumentation.
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| 2 |
ID:
143144
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| Summary/Abstract |
Much recent political thought has been devoted to the proposition that neither political endeavor properly understood nor theorizing about such endeavor is or could ever be a kind of rational activity. I examine three broad approaches that celebrate, respectively, rhetorical practices of political persuasion, agonistic conceptions of democracy, and, more generally, a kind of hard-headed critical realism rooted in the plain facts of political life. I argue that criticisms of rationalism in politics associated with these approaches systematically ignore central tenets of what might be called a post-Kantian convergence of recent and important philosophical perspectives and that such perspectives can be enormously useful in addressing and critically evaluating the underlying intellectual structures of political life.
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