Why is someone enduringly prized as a philosopher? To answer this question, this historical case study examines the intersecting careers of John Rawls and R. M. Hare. It looks at their writings, a complex chain of disagreements, the argumentative dimension. The essay moreover explores the clash of differing temperaments. Finally, themes in addition to ratiocination and personality are factored in: the leanings of the institutions that control access to intellectual endeavor; the public square—politics widely conceived—into which the two men were (...) thrown; and the cultural rivalry between England and America after World War Two. (shrink)

Husserl’s transcendental reduction admits of two motivations: the general methodological ban on begging the question, and the principle that a typology of objects ought to be based on a typology of my ways of cognizing them. As Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ agrees with the ‘linguistic phenomenology’ of many analytic philosophers in being at bottom an effort to understand what precisely we mean to say by asserting that there ‘exists’ a ‘consciousness-independent’ or ‘transcendent’ world, the ‘residue’ of transcendental reduction is my subjective (...) consciousness. My cognitive approaches to the latter and to that of somebody else are not only entirely different but ‘complementary’ in the sense of Bohr’s. In the course of searching for an identity criterion for temporal entities lacking a spatial localisation in the world, we can show that the allegedly noetic phenomenon of, say, my now seeing a cat is a noema, to wit, the cat-as-now-beingseen-by-me-in-such-and-such-a-manner. There is no sound base for postulating, over and above the noematic nature of my consciousness, a second, noetic, aspect thereof. (shrink)