ART AND LITERATURE
301
every new generation has a chance of refashioning the moral atmosphere. It
is not a condition that is inherited, that is contagious. My children will have
a chance to be good people or bad people. I see an openness toward the
future, rather than despondency about how it's not as cheerful or as hopeful
as it used to be. I was born in Budapest on the eve of World War II. My
childhood was surrounded by bombs and mines blowing up around me. I
don't see things now as all that bad, generally speaking, although in some
spheres there are serious things to
IilSS
about. On the whole, there is an
atmosphere of despondency here. I find that to be disturbing and I just want
to remind us that what will happen in the future to some extent is up to us.
Igor Webb:
I'm sorry we have to close this discussion, but we might get
back
to
all this later on, especially to the relationship between technology
and moraIi ty.
SESSION
V:
PHILOSOPHY: FROM METAPHYSICS TO
LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
Richard Garner:
This semester I have been teaching a senior seminar on
Dante's
Divine Comedy,
a work set very self-consciously at the turn of a
century. My students have happily found that philosophy and metaphysics
in this work are not as divorced from our world as they had supposed they
might be. Instead these disciplines in Dante's hands are urgently engaged
and entangled with life on earth and current events. As I see what
Professors Haack, Machan, and Stent have planned for their talks today
about philosophy, I realize that their talks are in fact, in that wonderful
Dantesque way, very much engaged with this world around us as we move
towards the new century.
Now, I would like to introduce to you Susan Haack, Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Miami. She is the author of
Philosophy of
Logics, Evidence a/ld Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology,
and
Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism.
The title of her presenta–
tion is "The Ethos of Inquiry and the Ethics of Intellect."
Susan Haack: I
take my theme from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who urged
his contemporaries, "let us affiont and reprimand the smooth mediocrity
and squalid contentment of the times."
I am going to talk about what real inquiry is, how it can come to be
corrupted, and what consequences are to be expected when that hap–
pens-and what this tells us about the "research ethic" and the ethics of
research, in philosophy.
