Beyond Philosophy

Questions of whether anything exceeds reasonable sense and meaning have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. These questions have even continued in postmodern thought as well as in liberatory philosophies in which many kinds of events and lineages are experienced and seen as beyond philosophy. In this cowritten text, distinguished philosophers Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott pay particular attention to lineages and their dynamism as they develop the idea of things beyond philosophy, beyond norms. This is not a history of philosophy or a critical study of a particular philosopher but a way to engage experience around dimensions of events that are beyond measuring, counting, meaning, and value. These attunements, they assert, are vitally important for the ways people orient themselves in the world and comport themselves in it. Tuana and Scott build on the alternatives to normative ethics that they find in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa. They urge attunement to the world as a way to speak about what is impossible to give voice to, to live in the spaces between speech and the unspeakable, and to conceptualize and articulate the boundaries of rational sensibility.

The authors of Beyond Philosophy, I believe, would neither affirm nor deny these more dire possibilities of beyond. And that is the great strength of their book and its major benefit, at least to me. The authors are to be congratulated and thanked. Their book deserves the widest possible readership and the deepest possible reading.

Nancy Tuana is DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. She is author of The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature.Charles E. Scott is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus and Research Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Living with Indifference.