Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality

(Hardback)

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Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality proposes a revisionary history of the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead and analytic philosophy, as well as a constructive proposal for how thinking with Whitehead can help disabuse analytic philosophy of the problem of intentionality. Lisa Landoe Hedrick defines analytic philosophy as primarily the intellectual tradition that runs from Gottlob Frege to Bertrand Russell to Wilfrid Sellars, or, geographically speaking, from Vienna to Cambridge to Pittsburgh between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As key members of the Pittsburgh School of philosophy, Robert Brandom and John McDowell pick up the Sellarsian project of reconciling nature and normativity in different ways, yet each of them presupposes a problematic relationship between language and the world precisely bequeathed to them by an implicit metaphysics of subjecthood that characterized analytic thinkers of the early twentieth century. Hedrick both investigates Whiteheads published and archived critiques of early analytic thoughtas an extension of a wider critique of modern philosophyand employs Whitehead to reimagine nature and normativity after the problem of intentionality by way of his aesthetics of symbolism. This book thereby builds upon a burgeoning effort among philosophers to interface process and analytic thought, but it is the first to focus on contemporary analytic thinkers.

Reviews

"This book is an excellent addition to studies on the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead and analytic philosophy, in general. In particular, it shows how Whiteheads critique of early trends in analytic thought is relevant to habits that impede progress in analytic thought today. This is especially the case regarding the problem of intentionality as found in the thought of John McDowell and Robert Brandom of the Pittsburgh School. An added (and unexpected) feature of the book is the light it sheds on the relationship between contemporary philosophy and ancient thought, particularly Plato."

Author Bio

Lisa Landoe Hedrick is a teaching fellow in the Divinity School and the College at the University of Chicago.