Ambitious scientific accounts of human thought and behavior have been a mainstay of American intellectual culture since World War II. But if such theories are true, what is the status of our highest words, the vocabularies that orient and inspire our actions? What forms are available today for exploring and embodying such terms as “good,” “courage,” or “justice”? This book considers the rise of the “postwar sage,” a strand of post-1945 American writing that takes up these questions in distinctive and illuminating ways. Walker Percy’s clash with behaviorist and cognitivist theories; Marilynne Robinson’s encounter with evolutionary psychology; Ralph Ellison’s combat with sociology; the quarrel with analytic philosophy in Stanley Cavell and David Foster Wallace: at stake in such cases is the status of our normative concepts, and what it means to invoke them in a technological culture that divides “facts” from “values” and treats our high words with deep suspicion. Moving among literary fiction, memoir, essays, personal correspondence, moral philosophy, and contemporary theories of mind, the book examines not only what these philosophical and literary figures think about the relationship between nature and norms, but also how this thinking emerges: when they call upon art, when they call upon argument, and how these various modes can inflect, bolster, and—just as crucially—trouble one another.
Memoirs of Serge Hollerbach (USA): Bright portraits of contemporaries by the outstanding artist of the second wave