SYMBOL AND CONSCIOUSNESS The selective and intentional character of consciousness has been stressed by empiricists and phenomenologists alike. The conscious act is always intentional: One is never simply conscious, but conscious of this or that. Consciousness is, in fact, defined by the phenomenologist as noematic intentionality in general. But quite as essential to the act…
THERE ARE two interesting things about current approaches to consciousness as a subject of inquiry. One is that the two major approaches, the explanatory-psychological and the phenomenological, go their separate ways, contributing nothing to each other. They do not tend to converge upon or supplement each other as do, say, atomic theory and electromagnetic theory.…
Doug and Caren talk Walker Percy and the vagaries of the self in our age. (H/T Brian Smith). a confederacy of duncesamnesiaCatholicismcomplexityjay tolsonJohn Kennedy Toolelost in the cosmospersonal identityphilosophical literaturePhilosophyThe Message in the Bottlethe moviegoerWalker Percy
THE SOURCE OF THE ANTINOMY The general source of the antinomy is not to be found, as is sometimes alleged, in the nature of the subject, man, the culture member who practices science but needs myths. Such an anthropology is in the last analysis incoherent because it requires two sorts of men, scientists who observe…
The Antinomy of Language Examples of the linguistic assertion S is P. Dr. ltard writes in The Savage of Aveyron that he tried to teach Victor the wild boy the word for milk, lait, as a sign of a biological need, by withholding the milk and uttering the word in its absence. This failed: After…
THE ANTINOMIES OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN ITS GRASP OF CULTURE Kant believed that when “pure reason” ventures beyond the manifold of experience, it falls into an antinomy. That is to say, equally valid trains of argument lead to contradictory conclusions. Now, apart from the truth or falsity of Kant’s argument, the fact is that…
CULTURE AS A SUBJECT OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD What happens when the functional method of the sciences is applied to cultural phenomena? Does culture lend itself to such an understanding? If there are difficulties in the cultural sciences, are the difficulties due to the complexity of the material, as is often alleged, or are the…
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SYMBOLIC ASSERTION AND A SPACE-TIME EVENT If one examines the characteristic moments of the scientific method, one will discover that they are basically assertions. Even if one happens to be an operationalist and maintains that the business of science is defining the physical operations by which concepts are arrived at and…
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD issues in statements about the world. Whether one is a realist, pragmatist, operationalist, or materialist, one can hardly doubt that the various moments of the scientific enterprise–induction, hypothesis, deduction, theory, law–are all assertions of sorts. Even observation and verification are in the final analysis not the physiological happenings in which the retina…
A Tertium Quid: The Lady Novelist? Tolstoy once said that a talented lady novelist could spend five minutes looking through the window of a barracks and know all she needed to know about soldiering. If she can see so much in five minutes, how much more must the talented therapist see after, say, a hundred…
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