Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy

ISBN-13: 9780415276986 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 192 str.

Robert C. Miner

Opis

Is knowing a purely passive reception of something concrete outside the mind, or when we know something are we creating something too? Spanning more than 500 years of philosophical enquiry from the Middle Ages to the present day, Robert Miner clarifies modern philosophical conceptions of knowing as making or constructing, and contrasts this view with the theological understanding of knowing as a participation in divine creation. This study demonstrates how 'creative knowledge' has its roots in the theologies of Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas Cusanus. It explores the multiple ways in which this idea influenced the architects of the modern philosophical viewpoint, most notably Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, despite their secular stance. Miner contends that, well in advance of Kant, one of these thinkers, Gaimbattista Vico provideds a remarkably succinct formulation of the metaphysical and epistemological core of modernity in his principle verum et factum convertuntur: the true and the made are convertible. In Truth in the Making, Robert Miner challenges the standard assumpation that Kant was the first thinker to conceive of knowing as constructive activity. By traci

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Thomas Aquinas; Chapter 2 Nicolaus Cusanus; Chapter 3 Francis Bacon; Chapter 4 René Descartes; Chapter 5 Thomas Hobbes; Chapter 6 Giambattista Vico; Chapter 7 Epilogue;

O autorze

Robert Miner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Honors College at Baylor University. He has published widely on the history of modern philosophy and is the author or Vico, Genealogist of Modernity.