The best way I have found to understand fundamental philosophical alternatives is by looking at the four aspects of any human situation. Whether we are talking about thought, art, or action, there are four aspects of the situation. There is the subject (thinker, artist, agent) and the object (the subject-matter, material, or thing to be acted upon). There is also a level of analysis that dissects these factors into their basic elements (atoms, for example) and one that relates them to the whole system. The subject-object relation are the two poles of experience. The other two aspects go beyond the experienced situation, either to the substratum beneath (reached by analysis) or to the whole system (reached through an overarching theory). These aspects produce four fundamental possibilities, reflected in ancient Greece in the Sophists (subject, "man is the maker"), Aristotle (natural objects divided into kinds or categories), the Atomists (analysis into elementary particles), and Plato (dialectic toward the encompassing intelligibility). The same four modes of thought structure "non-philosophical" theories in physics, biology, psychology, history, literature, and so on. Each mode rests on certain fundamental insights and each has made major contributions in science, art, politics, and so on. For me, the question is always what is a particular approach good at and what does it leave out. Atomists, for example, have made major contributions to physics, but their reductionism leaves out human experience, the natural world as we experience it (as distinct from pure equations), and makes little contribution to areas such as art and ethics. Other approaches have their own areas of strength and weakness. All this is my way of developing things I learned at the University of Chicago from Richard McKeon.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 02:56:22 +0000
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