Human Nature and Natural Knowledge

Everybody knows Marjorie Grene. In part, this is because she is a presence: her vividness, her energy, her acute intelligence, her critical edge, her quick humor, her love of talking, her passion for philosophy - all combine to make her inevitable. Marjorie Grene cannot be missed or overlooked or undervalued. She is there - Dasein personified. It is an honor to present a Festschrift to her. It honors philosophy to honor her. Professor Grene has shaped American philosophy in her distinc­ tive way (or, we should say, in distinctive ways). She was among the first to introduce Heidegger's thought ... critically ... to the American and English philosophical community, first in her early essay in the Journal of Philosophy (1938), and then in her book Heidegger (1957). She has written as well on Jaspers and Marcel, as in the Kenyon Review (1957). Grene's book Dreadful Freedom (1948) was one of the most important and influential introductions to Existentialism, and her works on Sartre have been among the most profound and insightful studies of his philosophy from the earliest to the later writings: her book Sartre (1973), and her papers 'L'Homme est une passion inutile: Sartre and Heideg­ ger' in the Kenyon Review (1947), 'Sartre's Theory of the Emo­ tions' in Yale French Studies (1948), 'Sartre: A Philosophical Study' in Mind (1969), 'The Aesthetic Dialogue of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty' in the initial volume of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1970), 'On First Reading L'Idiot de

Inhalt

I: Self and Society.- Love, Friendship, and Utility: On Practical Reason and Reductionism.- The "Internal Politics" of Biology and the Justification of Biological Theories.- Two Motivations for Rationalism: Descartes and Spinoza.- The Invention of Split Personalities.- Positivism, Sociology, and Practical Reasoning: Notes on Durkheim's Suicide.- II: Interpreting the Tradition.- Adequate Causes and Natural Change in Descartes' Philosophy.- Heidegger and the Scandal of Philosophy.- Spinoza and the Ontological Proof.- Tracking Aristotle's Noûs.- III: Science and Explanation.- Two Kinds of Teleological Explanation.- Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity.- Anthropocentrism Reconsidered.- Location and Existence.- Forms of Aggregativity.- IV: Rencontre.- Descartes and Merleau-Ponty on the Cogito as the Foundation of Philosophy.- The Worst Excess of Cartesian Dualism.- Genius, Scientific Method, and the Stability of Synthetic A Priori Principles.- Should Hume Be Answered or Bypassed?.- V: Reflections.- In and On Friendship.- The Professional Activities of Marjorie Grene.- The Publications of Marjorie Grene.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.