The Formation of Reason (eBook)

David Bakhurst is the John and Ella G. Charlton Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. He is the author of Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (1991) and co-editor (with Christine Sypnowich) of The Social Self (1995) and (with Stuart Shanker) of Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self (2001).

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Author's Preface

1. What Can Philosophy Tell Us About How History Made the
Mind?

What Role for Philosophy?

Wittgenstein and Davidson

Wittgenstein and Davidson Contrasted

McDowell

The Idea of Bildung

Understanding the Bildungsprozess

The Conceptual and the Practical

Conclusion

2. Social Constructionism

Social Constructionism Introduced

The Social Construction of Reality

Why Bother About Global Constructionism?

Against Global Constructionism

Matters Political

The Social Construction of Mental States

Why Mental States Are Not Socially Constructed

The Social Construction of Psychological Categories

Conclusion

3. Self and Other

Problems of Self and Other

The Problem of Self and Other in One's Own Person

Strawson on Persons

Wiggins on Persons and Human Nature

The Significance of Second Nature

Further Positives

Conclusion: Two Cautionary Notes

4. Freedom, Reflection and the Sources of Normativity

McDowell on Judgement

Owens's Critique

Defending Intellectual Freedom

Freedom and the Sources of Normativity

Sources of Normativity I: Practical Reasoning

Sources of Normativity II: Theoretical Reasoning

A McDowellian Response

Conclusion

5. Exploring the Space of Reasons

McDowell on the Space of Reasons

Brandom'sInferentialism

Ilyenkov on the Ideal

Conclusion

6. Reason and Its Limits: Music, Mood and Education

An Initial Response

The Challenge Reconfigured

Passivity Within Spontaneity

Mood

Mood, Salience and Shape

Music

Education

Conclusion

7. Education Makes Us What We Are

A Residual Individualism

Vygotsky's Legacy

Reconciling Vygotsky and McDowell

Personalism

Final Thoughts on Education

References

Index

"This is a book of fresh and original perceptions concerning
questions in mental, moral, and metaphysical philosophy. I admire
the system by which Bakhurst so often proceeds of critical resume
of previous work--both the old and the new, the familiar and
the unfamiliar. Few can cast the net so wide or, in doing so, stick
so admirably to the point. Here lies the possibility of progress in
philosophy."

--Professor David Wiggins, New College, Oxford

"The philosophy of Bildung must be at the heart of
any effort to comprehend our lives. This much will be evident to
the reader of David Bakhurst's admirable book The
Formation of Reason, which shows how reflection on
Bildung supplies us with the means to see through persistent
confusions besetting our thought about self and other, mind and
body, freedom and nature, autonomy and sociality."

--Professor Sebastian Rödl, Philosophisches Seminar,
Universität Basel