Bruce E. Fleming - Böcker

The title of this book is Art and Argument, however, these two subjects are treated in reverse order, first argument, then art. Art and Argument is an engagingly written work about how words work in the world and in art. Its freewheeling considerations range from everyday examples to speculative metaphysics, touching along the way on written works from columns by the advice doyenne Ann Landers to literature by D.H. Lawrence, the Japanese Modernist Soseki, and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Steven Dunn.

Science and the Self offers a fundamental re-conception of the relationship between science, a specific type of knowledge, and the other types of knowledge that are equally part of life. Those who practice science typically insist that it is objective, not subjective. Opposing them, philosophers such as Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault—indeed, the very tenor of our times—emphasize science's subjective qualities. Science and the Self seeks to explain how reasonable people can hold either view. Offering an alternative to Robert Nozick's relativism, it argues that the world is objective. However it is so only because (and to the extent that) we subjective humans banish from its language the vast iceberg of things, which cannot be expressed in its terms. Most of daily life is composed of situational knowledge, which, unlike the scientific knowledge we may distill from it, is tied to the specific moment and place it arises in. Science and the Self offers a refreshing, coherent view that explains the nature of the self in the world, the nature of belief, and whether miracles are possible.

In his new work, Disappointment, Bruce Fleming starts from the realization that even objective views of the world are so only under specific circumstances. Subjects range from war and the nature of explanation systems such as science and astrology to a concept Fleming calls "coloring." When we identify coloring, it seems to us that a single quality of something larger has eclipsed all its other qualities—for example, skin color or sexual orientation coming to stand for the whole much more complex individual. Once identified, coloring can be questioned and rejected. However, to eliminate coloring, we must already have identified it as such. Before we perceive coloring, we think we've given an objective description of the world: today's coloring was yesterday's objective. But this in turn suggests that today's objective may be tomorrow's coloring. Realizing this is what leads to the technical notion of disappointment examined in this text, a feeling that life is a process of constant revision, not a final state. Through the consideration of literature, artistic, and philosophical works, Fleming explores the impact of disappointment on our view of the world. Beginning with the imagery of Wordsworth who lamented the "glory in the flower" of our youth fading "into the light of common day," and the iconography of the death mask of King Tut, Disappointment suggests that the world both is what it claims to be, and yet is not.