The Conditions of Philosophy

rdf:langString The Conditions of Philosophy

rdf:langString The Conditions of Philosophy: Its Checkered Past, Its Present Disorder, and Its Future Promise is a 1965 book by the philosopher Mortimer Adler. The book is a reflexive account of philosophy's current status, and its future promise. Its main thesis is that philosophy can recover from its present state by meeting six conditions.Then he tackles related problems of methodology, the "Is-Ought" test, the "Mixed Question" test, as well as including incidental examinations of Popper, Heisenberg, James, etc., and reserving three chapters for the glories and fallacies of Ancient, Medieval and post-Cartesian philosophy. Adler recapitulated the main insights of this book in his later 1993 book, . He explains that in The Conditions of Philosophy, he emphasized two dimensions of philosophy, which provide theoretical and practical knowledge. He added two new dimensions to these two, the understanding of ideas as objects of thought, and the understanding of the different disciplines of intellectual work (Adler 1993, xxvii).