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| Ethical Perspectives |
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| Issue : 5/1 (April - 1998) |
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| Discussion with Harry Frankfurt - The Importance of Being Earnest (about the Right Things) |
| Ortwin de Graef |
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Page : 15 - 21 |
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There are various ways to come to terms with human matters — as we must still call them, begging the question — among them the issue of what matters to humans. One can adopt a resolutely and perhaps narrowly scientific stance and gather empirical evidence about human preferences and their actual or putative grounding in order to so describe what mattering means to humans. One can choose a genealogical or historical perspective and study the ways in which humans have explicitly and implicitly conceived of themselves as recipients of mattering throughout human history — this typically generates philosophy as commentary. Or one can choose the apparent askesis of armchair-phenomenology — a kind of self-imposed sensory deprivation indulged in by philosophers whose intent it is it to conceptually elucidate the structure of the human condition as, among other things, a site of mattering.
There are of course many shades and combinations of these attitudes, but as a rule people in the truth business tend to think of themselves as especially one or the other. Harry Frankfurt, for instance, clearly favours the third description as the properly philosophical or theoretical endeavour: the paucity of footnotes supplying substantiating empirical evidence for key statements in his arguments is matched only by the paucity of deferential references to dead philosophers in the course of his thought subsequent to its departure in Descartes.
Yet Frankfurt’s non-historical and relatively self-enclosed philosophical practice is not aggressive or dogmatic: it takes itself seriously enough to pursue its task in its own terms, but this ‘structural’ attempt to “see things clearly for what they are” seems in principle open to interruptions from more strictly scientific and from textual-historical fellow-thinkers. More specifically, it appears to me that a short-circuit between Frankfurt’s thought and an alternative philosophical constellation can do more than generate bullshit (which perhaps, to some extent, and for reasons admirably set out by Frankfurt himself, it must nonetheless do). In what follows I should like to briefly outline one or two such interruptions in the margin of Frankfurt’s impressive achievement. |
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