Metaphysics in Ordinary Language

by Stanley Rosen

In this rich collection of philosophical writings, Stanley Rosen addresses a wide range of topics―from eros, poetry, and freedom to problems like negation and the epistemological status of sense perception. Though diverse in subject, Rosen’s essays share two unifying principles: there can be no legitimate separation of textual hermeneutics from philosophical analysis, and philosophical investigation must be oriented in terms of everyday language and experience, although it cannot simply remain within these confines. Ordinary experience provides a minimal criterion for the assessment of extraordinary discourses, Rosen argues, and without such a criterion we would have no basis for evaluating conflicting discourses: philosophy would give way to poetry.

Philosophical problems are not so deeply embedded in a specific historical context that they cannot be restated in terms as valid for us today as they were for those who formulated them, the author maintains. Rosen shows that the history of philosophy―a story of conflicting interpretations of human life and the structure of intelligibility―is a story that comes to life only when it is rethought in terms of the philosophical problems of our own personal and historical situation.

Genres: Philosophy

305 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 1999

About the author

Stanley Rosen was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and Professor Emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.