Sunyata, Textualism, and Incommensurability
1994; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1399756
ISSN1529-1898
Autores Tópico(s)Theology and Philosophy of Evil
ResumoFor many commentators on the subject, contemporary Western philosophy has shown distinctive signs of consensus regarding a basic understanding of the fundamental constraints covering the employment of human rationality. Essentially, the view is that human reason operates always in a specific context that provides both a background of functional principles and a foreground of salient features and things. Therefore, from the fact that reason is essentially concerned with knowledge through truth, it does not follow that there is a necessary convergence regarding the conclusions we tend to draw in exercising our reason, should our forms of life happen to differ substantially. In other words, there has been a distinct retreat from a kind of objectivism that would insist that there are some principles inherent in the structure of reason that would provide grounds for a faith (at least) that we might establish some right version of the way things are-the truth, in short.1 At this point, many philosophers tend rather to argue either that such uniform principles (such as the laws of logic) are so general as to provide only the thinnest understanding of the functioning of the human intellect or that such seemingly uniform principles are simply reconstructions on the basis of a particular set of beliefs and concerns, and are illegitimately extended in trying to reconstruct the point of view of others who may not share the same initial perspective. Two recent examples spring immediately to mind and from seemingly opposite ends of the contemporary intellectual spectrum, in the form of W.V.O. Quine and Hans Georg Gadamer. Most notably in his classic Ontological Relativity, Quine argues that fundamental matters such as what there is are only settled relative to a conceptual scheme, meaning a tissue or network of terms and predicates and auxiliary devices ... our frame of reference, or coordinate system.2 Though Quine subscribes to much more than this minimal thesis and often has little to say about those forces that have shaped our conceptual scheme, for example history and culture, he does clearly insist on the relativistic nature of knowing that something is the case.3 That is, there is no piece of meaningful information (meaning an informative sentence) that is not embedded in and fails to presuppose an overall interpretative theory. In parallel fashion, Gadamer argues the case that all truth in the sense of what we can learn or discover (and not limited to scientific truth) is discovered and warranted relative to particular traditions. To be sure, these traditions are themselves transformed by the ongoing process of the discovery of truth, but they nonetheless condition it. All meaning and understanding are, for Gadamer, an interpretative event involving projecAssistant Professor of Philosophy at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York
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