In the World and About the World : Amerindian Modes of Knowledge Article 1 May 2006 Introduction : Amerindian Modes of Knowledge (original) (raw)

Knowledge, Spirit, Reason: An Essay in Comparative Philosophy

American Review of Canadian Studies, 2021

One of the ways in which a philosophy may exhibit its national character is to take up an acknowledged national theme or project and address it philosophically. This is the approach that I will take. The essay establishes, through reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that the relationship between Indigenous knowledge and Western science-based knowledge has become a recognized public issue in Canada. It shows that a relationship, or translation, between Indigenous knowledge and Western science-based knowledge through a lynch-pin that can be called “ecology.” Finally, it explicates the relation of spirit to embodiment within this translation through a comparison of Indigenous knowledge with a contemporary current in cognitive science.

Knowledge as the product of intellectual virtue

The paper argues that knowledge is to be understood as the possession of a belief that has been produced by the exercise of a power to form true beliefs. It rejects the view that there is something called justification, which can be common to both knowledge and justified false belief.

Making Knowledge: explorations of the indissoluble relation between mind, body and environment. Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

2010

There is growing recognition among social and natural scientists that nature or nurture should not be studied in isolation, for their interdependence is not trivial, but vital. The aim of this volume is to progress anthropology's thinking about human knowledge by exploring the interdependence of nurture with nature; and more specifically the interdependence of minds, bodies, and environments. This introductory essay begins with an overview of the (often conflicting) positions that dominated the 'anthropology of knowledge' in the closing decades of the last century before proceeding to a discussion of recent convergences between cognitivists, phenomenologists, and practice theorists in their 'thinking about knowing'. In the following section I use my own studies with craftspeople to reflect on apprenticeship as both a mode of learning and a field method, since the majority of authors included in this volume also took up apprenticeships of one form or another. Next, the idea that 'cognition is individual' is firmly established, but it is equally conceded that 'making knowledge' is a process entailing interaction between interlocutors and practitioners with their total environment. Before concluding with a summary of the scope and contents of the volume, I briefly present a theory of 'shared production' in knowledge-making that draws upon recent literature in cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. Making knowledge, after all, is an ongoing process shared between people and with the world.j rai_1607 1..21 Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, book 2, chapter 1: 31-2 In the above quote, Aristotle concisely describes the combination of nature and nurture that is us. As a species, we are composed, in part, of innate capacities-perceptual, cognitive, and motor-that engage us with the world of which we are a part, and thereby enable us to survive, adapt, and thrive. By contrast, 'arts and virtues' are not endowed, but realized and reinforced in practice. Anthropological studies of knowledge have traditionally concentrated on the by-products of nurture, consigning the

Subjectivity and Knowledge

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences will fill in the gap in the existing coverage of links between new theoretical advancements in the social and human sciences and their historical roots. Making that linkage is crucial for the interdisciplinary synthesis across the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, semiotics, and the political sciences. In contemporary human sciences of the 21st there exists increasing differentiation between neurosciences and all other sciences that are aimed at making sense of the complex social, psychological, and political processes. Thus new series has the purpose of (1) coordinating such efforts across the borders of existing human and social sciences, (2) providing an arena for possible inter-disciplinary theoretical syntheses, (3) bring into attention of our contemporary scientific community innovative ideas that have been lost in the dustbin of history for no good reasons, and (4) provide an arena for international communication between social and human scientists across the World.

Knowledge, Being and the Human

Initial parts of my book from 2013 "Knowledge, Being and the Human. Some of the Major Issues in Philosophy": http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Being-Human-Contemporary-Philosophical/dp/3631622856 This book, in the form of a classical philosophical treatise, presents a large-scale theoretical project: It uses a metaphilosophical perspective to present the framework for postmetaphysical thinking, situating it in the domain of the metaphysics of morality. It offers an innovative defence of scepticism based on a critical and radical analysis of the concepts of knowledge and truth. Metaphysical and transcendental traditions are deconstructed, mainly in relation to the paradoxes of so-called realism and idealism, which are the consequence of dependence on an archaic substance theory. Moreover, the book proposes a certain form of philosophising in spite of everything, i.e. within a sceptical approach. The critique of ethics leads to an a-ethical concept of the will and the values of life.

Knowledge. An Illustrated History

EVS Press, 2019

This 500+ page volume traces 2500 years of Western philosophical thought on the nature and acquisition of knowledge. The 18 chapters cover important thinkers from Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Protagoras, through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, to Christian thinkers on revelation, Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, Bergson, and Polyani, ending with surveys of current trends in epistemology.

The Rational Human Condition 5—Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge (OUP, 2015)

Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. Cognition, Content, and the A Prori is riding the crest of a wave of extremely exciting and even revolutionary emerging new trends and new work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with a special concentration on the philosophy of perception, especially by young philosophers like Susanna Schellenberg and Susanna Siegel, but also fully including the recent work of longstanding seminal figures like Tyler Burge and Hubert Dreyfus. What is revolutionary in this new wave are the strong emphases on action, on cognitive phenomenology, on disjunctivist direct realism, on embodiment, on perception as the inherently non-conceptual fundamental capacity of minded animals for cognizing the world, and on non-conceptual content. So it is my deepest hope that Cognition, Content, and the A Priori can make a real contribution to this philosophical revolution by giving the new wave a specifically contemporary Kantian twist, and by pushing these new lines of investigation even harder and further than has already been done. Andrew Chapman, Jonathan Shaheen, and Kelly Vincent each read and made detailed critical comments on earlier complete drafts of this book, and Catherine Legg did the same for an early version of chapter 8. In the last phases of revising the manuscript for publication, Robert Abele and David Landy sent me very helpful critical comments on and/or questions about the penultimate draft, which led to many clarifications or reformulations in the ultimate version. In addition, Martha Hanna read several chapters of the penultimate draft, making apt editorial suggestions on almost every page. I'm extremely fortunate to have had such careful, close readers. Over the past decade, I have had the good fortune to present various parts of this project to scholarly audiences in Europe, Australia, Israel, South America, and North America. I thank everyone who invited me to present my work at conferences and workshops they organized. I am particularly grateful to Monima Chadha and her colleagues at the University of Monash; to the faculty at the University of Tampere, Finland; and especially to Dietmar Heidemann and his philosophical colleagues and students at the University of Luxembourg, whose generous support of this project in 2013-2014, funded by the Fonds Nationale de Recherche Luxembourg, made it possible to work on the final drafts of the manuscript and at the same time to engage with an international community of scholars through a series of philosophical workshops. I am also especially grateful to the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge University for the opportunity to visit there as a full-time temporary lecturer during 2008-2009, and teach Kant's metaphysics, the philosophy of perception, the theory of meaning, and the philosophy of mathematics, and also to participate in the weekly Philosophy of Logic and Maths discussion group run by Michael Potter and Peter Smith; to Jane Heal and Jim Russell, for thought-provoking pub-supper chats about cognition and non-conceptual content; to the members of my Foundations of Analytic Philosophy Group in the Faculty, for good discussions on the philosophy of logic and mathematics; to Nick Treanor, for fruitful conversations on the philosophy of mind and action; to the Kant Reading Group at HPS (especially Angela Breitenbach and Sacha Golob), for equally fruitful conversations on Kant's metaphysics; to Fitzwilliam College, for providing me with a Bye-Fellowship during 2008-2009 and a lovely scholarly home away from home; and to Alex Oliver and Michael Potter, for arranging it all.