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M. L. Dickson
Cartesian approach: 1600 - 1930 ; Heideggerian : 1930 onwards (& existential) Martin Heidegger: 1889 - 1976 Famous German Philosopher
The Cartesian position focuses on separating me from the world. The Heideggerian position focuses on showing how me and the world are joined, and can never be separated . The Cartesian position presupposes that I can be separated from the world, and then the BIG QUESTION is: How do I Know that I can bridge the gap to the world and reality? For the Cartesian, the Big Question becomes one of Epistemology . However, the Heideggerian position presupposes that I cannot be separated from the world as I do my investigations, and therefore what I know arises from examining me and the world taken together. After all, I am part of reality. What right does Descartes have to say that there is an ontological duality ? What if Descartes is wrong in saying that MIND is fundamentally different to MATTER , and can exist without it? What if MIND and MATTER are fundamentally joined ? This would mean that I cannot investigate MIND without investigating MATTER at the same time. The BIG QUESTION now (for Heidegger)is: What is the world or reality like that I see? The Big Question becomes one of Metaphysics .. i.e. of what does reality consist? What is existence or Being all about? * Lets look briefly at each of these two positions again: the Cartesian position, and then the Heideggerian position.
5. Knowledge as a MIRROR
A. The Cartesian Spectator
3
A Mirror
The knowledge that the Cartesian spectator arrives at has often been called a mirror of reality or of the world. Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant.. all of them are concerned to attain to knowledge that reflects the world or Nature in some accurate way. But Heidegger paved the way for an attack on the mirror, because the mirror depends on a spectator subject who is distanced from reality, just as a mirror is distanced from the object it is reflecting . Rorty (Richard Rorty : Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.pg 6): Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey are in agreement that the following notion must be abandoned: the notion of knowledge as accurate representationof the mind as a great mirror (pg12). Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself (pg12) .For W, H and D, the notion of foundations of knowledge and the notion of philosophy revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic, are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of the mind as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible.they set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines.(pg6) Rorty notes how Heidegger and others in fact do away with epistemology as well as metaphysics. What does he mean? Well he means that we cannot start with questions about how we know we know.. because all this pre-supposes a spectator distanced from the world, and so instead you ask What do I know and end up knowing something in-the-way-you-experience-it, and this cannot be certain, or the same for everyone. This effectively does away with epistemology and metaphysics as disciplines. For the Christian please note: Heidegger and others are primarily attacking Cartesianism, not Christianity. We must be careful not to take sides on these debates, but to critique them from a Biblical standpoint. John Frame writes: On the 1st page of the Institutes, Calvin observes that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self are interrelated. We might expect Calvin to add that of course of the two, the knowledge of God comes first. Remarkably, Calvin says instead that he doesnt know which comes first. This comment I take to be enormously perceptive. The best way to look at the matter is that neither knowledge of God nor knowledge of self is possible without knowledge of the other, and growth in one area is always accompanied by growth in the other. I cannot know myself rightly until I see myself as Gods fallen image: fallen, yet saved by grace. But I cannot know God rightly until I seek to know Him as one created by Him, and as a servant. The 2 kinds of knowledge, then, come simultaneously, and they grow togetherFurthermore, all the information we receive about God, through nature, Scripture, or whatever source, comes to us through our eyes, ears, minds and brains through ourselves. Sometimes we dream fondly of a purely objective knowledge of God a knowledge freed from the limitations of our senses, minds, experiences, preparation and so forth. But nothing of this sort is possible, and God does not demand it of us A purely objective knowledge is precisely what we dont want! Such knowledge would presuppose a denial of our creaturehood and thus a denial of God and of all truth. John Frame : The doctrine of the Knowledge of God P&R 1987
6. ALIENATION
Alienation
But from the 1700's on, as increasingly philosophers felt no need for God, this problem of the spectator alienated from the reality around him became more intense. ( based on Cooper Existentialism p23)
See downalods 2 June 2012 http://www.scribd.com/doc/72540092/Ricouer-Narrative-Interpretation Ricouer-Narrative-Interpretation ON PAUL RICOEUR by David Wood 224 pages
Kevin J.Vanhoozer is Lecturer in Theology at the University of Edinburgh, where he specializes in Paul Ricoeur, contemporary hermeneutics and questions of theological method. He is the author of Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (1990) and several essays on hermeneutics An essential companion to Time and Narrative, this collection also provides an excellent introduction to Ricoeurs later work and to contemporary works in philosophical hermeneutics. It will be of major interest to literary theorists, narratologists, historians and philosophers. David Wood teaches philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he is Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. He is the author of The Deconstruction of Time and Philosophy at the Limit. This book examines the later work of Paul Ricoeur, particularly his major work, Time and Narrative. The essays, including three pieces by Ricoeur himself, consider this important study, extending and developing the debate it has inspired. Time and Narrative is the finest example of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics and is one of the most significant works of philosophy published in the late twentieth century. Paul Ricoeurs study of the intertwining of time and narrative proposes and examines the possibility that narrative could remedy a fatal deficiency in any purely phenomenological approach. He analysed both literary and historical writing, from Proust to Braudel, as well as key figures in the history of philosophy: Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS TO RICOEURS TIME AND NARRATIVE by Kevin J.Vanhoozer In the first section of this paper I discuss Ricoeurs approach to Kants problem of the productive or creative imagination. In the second section I focus on Ricoeurs appropriation of Heideggers notion of the temporality of human being. I wish to argue that Ricoeurs narrative theory is an attempt to think these two problems, imagination and time, together. The final section considers Ricoeurs recent work in light of his larger philosophical project, the Philosophy of the Will, and his attempt to answer the question: What is Man? by discovering what is humanly possible. Ricoeur, represented by his earlier work in philosophical anthropology, is himself an important philosophical antecedent to Time and Narrative.