Reviewed by:

• Reading as a Philosophical Practice by Robert Piercey
• Iris Vidmar Jovanović

Robert Piercey's Reading as a Philosophical Practice is dedicated to exploring the passion of reading, and to explaining ways in which common readers, as Virginia Woolf calls them, rather than professionals, engage with reading. Piercey's answer to this question, which is also the central claim of the book, is that reading—independently of the subject or a genre—is a philosophical activity, that is, "a kind of reflection on experiences and capacities that are distinctive to human beings" (p. 3). As Piercey argues, reading inevitably invites one to consider issues that fall within three main philosophical domains: those related to selfhood; those related to ethical questions, primarily the ones asking about a valuable life; and those concerning ontological questions regarding the true nature of things. Inspiration for this account comes from the writings of Henry James, Stanley Cavell, and Marcel Proust, each of whom describes reading as an experience in which one's self enlarges and new dimensions of subjectivity are revealed. Piercey's ambition is to understand precisely what happens in such moments of discovery, and he sets out to offer an account of the essence of the experience of reading that explains why reading matters so profoundly to so many people.

Piercey finds a philosophical grounding for his main claim in Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological account of reading and Alasdair MacIntyre's account of practice. Piercey praises Iser's account of reading as an activity prolonged in time, during which a reader is situated within the text, and tries to rebuild that text by constantly going through interpretative stages. Such a "wandering viewpoint" (p. 20) generates in one a sense of living through an altered subjectivity. As Piercey argues, the greatest value of this explanation is its capacity to account for how a text is given to one's consciousness.

Insightful as it is, however, Iser's account has limits, given his focus on fictional classics and his belief that the aim of reading is to arrive at the correct interpretation of a text. To overcome these shortcomings, Piercey adopts MacIntyre's account of practice and argues that understanding reading as a [End Page 468] type of social practice means recognizing it as "embedded in, and expressive of, a full range of human activities and a full picture of the human person." Moreover, thinking of reading as a practice encourages us to see it "as a space where one reflects on what kind of a person one should become, and tries earnestly to make oneself into that kind of a person" (p. 25).

What such a project looks like is examined in the third chapter, where Piercey analyzes writings on reading by novelist Nick Hornby. This chapter is particularly interesting in tackling questions that pop up when one pursues reading as important for one's well-being: questions concerning which books to read and which to skip, issues regarding rereading, and the like. The rhetorical power of this chapter is immense, in raising one's awareness of the many nuances that a reflective approach to reading invites. This awareness is further advanced in the sixth chapter, in which Piercey presents "descriptive hermeneutical ontology" (p. 71) to explain how readers discover what is valuable and meaningful about the nature of things and attachments in the process of reading. Interesting here is the dual nature of books that Piercey describes, namely their material copies and their content, or virtual reality, and the instrumental and intrinsic ways in which each of the two can acquire meaning for individual readers. He concludes that reading matters to so many people because it lets them experience and reflect on the fragmentation built into their encounters with things.

In chapter 4, Piercey discusses one of the cornerstones of literary aesthetics: the view—as developed by, among others, Martha Nussbaum—that reading makes us morally better. Piercey acknowledges the relevance of empirical challenge to this view, particularly as advanced by Gregory Currie. Piercey claims that the Nussbaum-like approach to getting ethical lessons from reading is an...

审阅者：

• 罗伯特·皮尔西的《阅读作为一种哲学实践》
• 艾里斯·维德玛·约万诺维奇

罗伯特·皮尔斯的《阅读作为一种哲学实践》致力于探索阅读的热情，并解释弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫所说的普通读者（而不是专业人士）参与阅读的方式。皮尔西对这个问题的回答也是本书的核心主张，即阅读——独立于主题或流派——是一种哲学活动，即“对人类独特的经验和能力的一种反思”。存在”（第 3 页）。正如皮尔西所说，阅读不可避免地会让人思考属于三个主要哲学领域的问题：与自我有关的问题；与自我相关的问题；与自我相关的问题。那些与道德问题有关的问题，主要是那些询问有价值的生活的问题；以及有关事物真实本质的本体论问题。这篇文章的灵感来自亨利·詹姆斯、斯坦利·卡维尔和马塞尔·普鲁斯特的著作，他们都将阅读描述为一种体验，在这种体验中，一个人的自我扩展和主观性的新维度被揭示。皮尔斯的雄心是准确地理解在这些发现时刻发生的事情，他着手描述阅读体验的本质，解释为什么阅读对这么多人如此重要。

皮尔西在沃尔夫冈·伊瑟尔对阅读的现象学解释和阿拉斯代尔·麦金泰尔对实践的解释中找到了他的主要主张的哲学基础。皮尔西称赞伊塞尔将阅读视为一种时间上延长的活动，在此期间，读者处于文本之中，并试图通过不断经历解释阶段来重建文本。这种“徘徊的观点”（第20页）让人产生一种通过改变主观性而生活的感觉。正如皮尔西所说，这种解释的最大价值在于它能够解释文本如何被赋予一个人的意识。

然而，尽管伊瑟尔的见解很有洞察力，但他的叙述也有局限性，因为他专注于虚构的经典作品，并且相信阅读的目的是为了对文本做出正确的解释。为了克服这些缺点，皮尔西采用了麦金泰尔对实践的解释，并认为将阅读理解为一种[结束页468]类型的社会实践意味着承认它“嵌入并表达了一系列人类活动和人类活动的全貌”。人类。” 此外，将阅读视为一种实践鼓励我们将其视为“一个反思自己应该成为什么样的人的空间，并认真努力使自己成为那样的人”（第25页）。

第三章探讨了这样一个项目的样子，皮尔斯分析了小说家尼克·霍恩比的阅读著作。本章特别有趣的是解决当一个人追求对一个人的幸福很重要的阅读时出现的问题：有关阅读哪些书和跳过哪些书的问题，有关重读的问题等等。本章的修辞力量是巨大的，它提高了人们对反思性阅读方法所带来的许多细微差别的认识。这种意识在第六章中得到了进一步的推进，皮尔斯在其中提出了“描述性解释学本体论”（第71页）来解释读者如何在阅读过程中发现事物本质和依恋的有价值和有意义的东西。这里有趣的是皮尔斯描述的书籍的双重性质，即它们的材料副本和内容，或虚拟现实，以及两者中的每一个为个体读者获取意义的工具和内在方式。他的结论是，阅读对很多人来说都很重要，因为它让他们体验并反思他们与事物的接触中内置的碎片。

在第四章中，皮尔西讨论了文学美学的基石之一：由玛莎·努斯鲍姆等人提出的观点，即阅读使我们在道德上变得更好。皮尔西承认经验挑战对这一观点的相关性，特别是格雷戈里·柯里提出的观点。皮尔西声称，从阅读中获得道德教训的类似努斯鲍姆的方法是......