Faculty Video: Who Needs a Worldview? Raymond Geuss in Conversation

On Sunday, February 28th, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Michael Stevenson, and Rebecca Ariel Porte welcomed philosopher Raymond Geuss for a wide-ranging discussion of Geuss’s most recent book Who Needs a Worldview? (Harvard). Among the points discussed: why worldviews aren’t simply large theories, but modes of personal identity; how theory arises from failure and personal inadequacy; whether we can have an account of (what Adorno calls) social totality; Hegel’s conception of thinking as “movement”; pragmatism; why Geuss wants us “to forget Kant, forget Plato”; Lenin’s non-dogmatism; why all ideas are bad ideas; the consolations of the worldview; utopianism; the thought and style of Sydney Morgenbesser; philosophizing in public; why Geuss felt he had nothing much to say in America; and “having one’s Bruegel, and critiquing it, too.”