Pacini, David S. Review of David Walsh, THE MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION. NDPR (September 2009).

Walsh, David. The Modern Philosophical Revolution: the Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. It is arguable that the advance of science and technology, together with the global expanse of the languages of political and moral rights, are hallmarks of the modern spirit. To these, David Walsh proposes a third, and presumably equally momentous, trait: the philosophical revolution that has prioritized the horizon of existence within which we find ourselves. Not a sometime insight, as others have argued, but, on Walsh's reading, a sustained course of inquiry, the shift of perspective to our meditative participation in existence portends the only viable mode of philosophizing. He sets out the case for this claim in The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, the crown jewel of an unintended trilogy on the problem of 'modernity'. The first volume, After Ideology (1990), a study of the crisis evoked by totalitarianism, turns on the claim that the truth of the modern world can only be articulated from within it. From such a perspective, good and evil are the imprescriptable boundaries of our existence. The second volume, The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997), addresses the underlying question posed by After Ideology: how could various invocations of liberal principles and claims of rights -- both natural and human -- sustain a consensus in the absence of a coherent overarching intellectual framework? Walsh argues that beneath the superficial incoherence lies an inward coherence that is manifest in existence. In other words, what may not work in theory appears to work in practice. Both After Ideology and The Growth of the Liberal Soul recast this point philosophically, arguing that existence is prior to all formulations of it. The agenda for The Modern Philosophical Revolution is to bring into view the philosophical logic of the insight that existence precedes thought. In this latest volume, Walsh launches a magnificent elegy over the course of some four hundred and sixty nine pages to the priority of existence essaying eight philosophers from Kant to Derrida. In keeping with his own maxim that philosophy can only be conducted from within, Walsh thinks through the philosophical accomplishments of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Kierkegaard by way of a close re-reading of their works. Not surprisingly, this is a tome for neither the faint-of-heart nor the philosophically untutored; the level of argumentation places fierce demands upon its reader, presupposing, as it does, a deep knowledge of the figures under consideration. Yet persistence does not go without reward: what first appears as exegetical readings of the eight philosophers under consideration quickly proves to be a highly nuanced set of meditations. And it is these meditations on the works of each thinker that permits Walsh to advance his own thesis. In what follows, I propose (1) to chart briefly the course of his thesis; (2) to bring into view the underlying meditational form that foregrounds his pivotal claims about necessity; and (3) to puzzle over this underlying thesis about necessity in relation to Kierkegaard. Although to pursue an interpretation of Walsh's The Modern Philosophical Revolution in this way runs the risk of distortion, it also holds out the prospect of casting the principal moves of Walsh's argument in bold relief. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17625.