The Last Conference: A Pragmatist Saga

Once, philosophers like Plato and Kierkegaard combined narratives and logical arguments to engage both brain hemispheres, creating a kind of Gesamtphilosophy. Nowadays, philosophers mostly communicate with their left hemisphere. In this book, Gesamtphilosophy is restored in a spirit of pragmatism. It is the story of an inexperienced NY Times journalist who is sent to Reykjavik by his editor to cover a philosophy conference on experience, where he himself becomes experienced. During the conference he reports from five presentations on views of experience: Those of Timothy Williamson, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, Richard Rorty, and John Dewey, all representing increasingly complex theories. At the same time, he experiences what the theories say. He becomes a participant, rather than a mere reporter, and finds himself living a modern saga, with striking similarities to a certain Old Norse saga. Dramatic events, involving love and power struggle, are crowned by a volcanic eruption with fatal consequences, before he returns to NY as a very experienced man.

Arild Pedersen (b. 1946), Professor Emeritus in philosophy from the University of Oslo, has published books about the theory of the novel, about David Copperfield, and about the philosophy of music. He has also published a novel, and is active as a cultural politician and critic in the vein of Rorty and Dewey, writing columns and reviews in newspapers and periodicals for a general public.