Earl Ronneberg

Dawn Earl Ronneberg

'Dawn' is a philosophical narrative exploring multiple meanings of the word as those meanings are set against case studies of life experiences together with philosophical views, the latter ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne through Kierkegaard, Kant, Nicholas Berdyaev, Gabriel Marcel, James Conant, and John McDowell. While the dawning of a new day begins the odyssey and is never completely absent, the dawn as a metaphor for 'upbringing' and its effects over time becomes even more central as that tale progresses toward Aristotle's and John McDowell's integration of 'upbringing' in their philosophical writings. In this way 'Dawn' explicates the notion of how new forms of ethical thought enter human consciousness. Ending with McDowell's idea of 'second nature,' brief stops along the way integrate individual writings from Hugh of Saint Victor, Martin Luther, the Ottawa medicine society of Midewiwin, Charles Darwin, Joseph Conrad, A. J. Grout, Milan Kundera, Hegel, Martin Seligman, and Jonathan Lear. The entire narrative focuses on a lifetime of excursions into 'practical wisdom' using both fictional and real experiences as a background. In conjunction with McDowell's analysis, 'Dawn' highlights the strength of his philosophy -- as outlined in 'Mind and World' and key essays from 'Mind, Value & Reality' -- by showing (in the mind of one reviewer of McDowell's) how his work creatively weaves, "from the history of thought in general and philosophy in particular," answers that make sense "of an account of the deepest intellectual sources of the problems constituting 'modern' philosophy."