Retrieving Realism - Couverture rigide

Dreyfus, Professor Hubert; Taylor, Charles

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0674967518 ISBN 13 : 9780674967519

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

A picture held us captive, writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations," describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism" offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe. According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This mediational epistemology internal ideas mediating external reality continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it by handling things, moving among them, responding to them and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes s privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared. Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science."

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Hubert Dreyfus is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order of Canada.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674967518
• ISBN 13: 9780674967519
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 184
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible