A Philosophy of the Essay: Scepticism, Experience and Style

Description

Erin Plunkett draws from both analytic and continental sources to argue for the philosophical relevance of style, making the case that the essay form is uniquely suited to address the sceptical problem. The authors examined here-Montaigne, Hume, the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard and Stanley Cavell-bring into relief the relationship between scepticism and ordinary life and situate the will to know within a broader frame of meaningful human activity. The formal features of the essay call attention to time, subjectivity, and language as the existential conditions of knowledge. In contrast to foundationalist approaches, which expect philosophy to reach empirical or rational certainty, Plunkett demonstrates through these writings the philosophical advantages of a fragmentary, non-dogmatic style of writing. A Philosophy of the Essay shows how this medium can help us come to terms with the contingency and uncertainty of life.

Erin Plunkett is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

By interpreting the essayistic mode as distinctively responsive to scepticism, Erin Plunkett provides an account of some of its exemplary modern practitioners that sheds new light on the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical dimensions of their chosen form, and thereby on a persistently overlooked but repeatedly renewed philosophical tradition. * Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK * This is a timely and highly illuminating book that should widen the focus of contemporary Anglophone philosophy. By revealing the significance of the form of philosophical writing in a series of historical examples from Montaigne to Cavell, Plunkett sheds new light on key issues in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics in both the analytical and European traditions. * Andrew Bowie, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and German, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK * In this perceptive and illuminating study, Erin Plunkett identifies a genre of writing that is literary and philosophical at once, and which unites such otherwise disparate thinkers as Hume and Kierkegaard. She convincingly demonstrates that the essay (or 'attempt') is a form well-suited for examining our condition of contingent finitude, and thereby for clarifying human existence. A Philosophy of the Essay makes an elegant case for reflective authors whose work remains true to life. * Rick Anthony Furtak, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College, USA *