The Elusiveness of The Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy Yale University, hardcover isbn: 0300091974 $37.50 buy

Friday Forum: Stanley Rosen, September 20

The concept of the ordinary, along with such cognates as everyday life, ordinary language, and ordinary experience, has come into special prominence in late modern philosophy. Thinkers have employed two opposing yet related responses to the notion of the ordinary: scientific and phenomenological approaches on the one hand, and on the other, more informal or even anti-scientific procedures. Eminent philosopher Stanley Rosen here presents the first comprehensive study of the main approaches to theoretical mastery of ordinary experience. He evaluates the responses of a wide range of modern and contemporary thinkers and grapples with the peculiar problem of the ordinary ­ how to define it in its own terms without transforming it into a technical (and so, extraordinary) artifact.

Rosen's approach is both historical and philosophical. He offers Montesquieu and Husserl as examples of the scientific approach to ordinary experience; contrasts Kant and Heidegger with Aristotle to illustrate the transcendental approach and its main alternatives; discusses attempts by Wittgenstein and Strauss to return to the pre-theoretical domain; and analyzes the differences among such thinkers as Moore, Austin, Grice, and Russell with respect to the analytical response to ordinary language. Rosen concludes with a theoretical exploration of the central problem of how to capture the elusive ordinary intact.

Biography

Stanley Rosen is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and University Professor at Boston University. Prior to coming to Boston University in the fall of 1994, he was Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Rosen has also taught as a Visiting Professor at the University of California in San Diego, the University of Nice, and the Scuola Superiore in Pisa.

The Elusiveness of the Ordinary is Professor Rosen's 13th book. He has published over thirty papers in books and over sixty articles in professional journals, many in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, and Hebrew translations. Rosen has held a variety of fellowships and honorary positions, including the Companys Professorship at the University of Barcelona and the presidency of the Metaphysical Society of America. Dr. Rosen is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Lisbon (1997). In 1999 he was chosen to be the recipient of the Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Rosen has delivered over 190 lectures in the United States and abroad including, over the last decade or so, at the Universities of Padua, Torino, Paris, Mainz, Barcelona, California (Berkeley), Texas (Austin), and Chicago; the Heidelberg, Stockholm, Tübingen, Bonn, Manchester, Essex, Duke, Brandeis, Emory, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale Universities; the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris); the Ecole Saint-Jacques (Brussels); and Williams College. In 1997 he presented the Priestley Lectures at the University of Toronto, and in 1998 he was the Cardinal Mercier Lecturer at the Catholic University of Leuven.

Over the coming months, Dr. Rosen will give the BU annual faculty lecture, address the Boston Association for Classical Philosophy, lecture on Spinoza at Cardozo Law School in New York, and present a cycle of six lectures in French at the Institut Catholique in Paris in November 03, as holder of the Etienne Gilson chair.

Books by Stanley Rosen

The Elusiveness of the Ordinary (forthcoming 2002)

Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (Yale University Press, 1999)

The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge University Press 1995)

Plato's Statesman: The Web of Politics (Yale University Press 1995)

The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (Yale University Press 1993)

The Ancients and the Moderns (Yale University Press 1989)

The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry (Routledge 1988)

Plato's Symposium (Yale University Press 1987)

Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford University Press 1987)

Plato's Sophist (Yale University Press 1983)

The Limits of Analysis (Basic Books 1980)

G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (Yale University Press 1974)

Nihilism: a Philosophical Essay (Yale University Press 1969)