A philosophical daybook

Name: A philosophical daybook
Author: William H. Poteat
ISBN: 0826207480

by William H. Poteat (1990)

Read Free Sample Buy on Amazon Audible Free Trial

About this book

It was the invention and dissemination of alphabetic literacy some twenty-six hundred years ago that produced the Enlightenment that became our philosophical tradition. Descartes consolidated in his mind-body dualism that the values and images of literacy that Western intellectuals embraced. But literacy was not without price, according to William H. Poteat: in a world of printed words and discarnate readers, nihilism and cultural insanity reign. Poteat strikes through the veil of our literate imaginations to an archaic but still active reality that antedates literacy - the intractable and substantial actuality of the lively words we speak and hear spoken. In the medium of printed words he seeks the philosophic import of our ongoing oral/aural life, which has been obscured and denigrated by the images and values we have learned as readers. By every available rhetorical strategy, therefore, this must be an anti-book. It must strive to defeat our centuries-old habituation to the book as spectacle, in order that we may be brought to dwell in the immediacies of our lively selves in the world, as we do in our oral/aural life. A Philosophical Daybook: Post-Critical Investigations sets out to induce a radical and irreversible transformation in the way we apprehend the world and our being in it. With journal entries written over fifteen months, Poteat attempts the impossible. In a world threatened by our own false conception of our nature and our place in the world, Poteat - by a feat of philosophical archaeology - seeks, still intact within ourselves, the ground for a new philosophy of the human. -- from dust jacket.

Setting / LocationGlobal

Story EraModern Era

Protagonist / CoreA philosophical daybook Lead Character

Themes & Moods

Philosophy & Religion Mind and body Philosophy Modern Era

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

Mind in a Physical World

Jaegwon Kim

This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind - in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. Kim construes the mind-body problem as that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. Among other points, he redefines the roles of supervenience and emergence in the discussion of the mind-body problem. Arguing that various contemporary accounts of mental causation are inadequate, he offers his own partially reductionist solution on the basis of a novel model of reduction.

Models of the self

Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear

"A long history of inquiry about human nature and the self stretches from the ancient tradition of Socratic self-knowledge in the context of ethical life to contemporary discussions of brain function in cognitive science. It begins with a conflict among the ancients. On one view, which comes to be represented most clearly by Aristotle, the issue is settled in terms of a composite and very complex human nature. Who I am is closely tied to my embodied existence. The other view, found as early as the Pythagoreans, and developed in the writings of Plato, Augustine and Descartes, held that genuine humanness is not the result of an integration of 'lower' functions, but a purification of those functions in favour of a liberating spirituality. The animal elements are excluded from the human essence. The modern debate on the problem of the self, although owing much to the insights of Locke and Hume, can still be situated within the context of the two schools of ancient thought, and this has led many to despair over the lack of apparent progress in this problem." "Today, of course, we often tend to look to science rather than philosophy to develop our understanding of a wide range of fundamental issues. To what extent is the problem of the self a scientific issue? Can insights from the study of neuropsychology and cognitive development in infancy provide a new perspective? Can the study of schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders tell us anything about the nature of human self-consciousness?" "Many would answer yes to the above questions, but then is it not also the case that the study of exceptional 'self-actualised' human experience is equally relevant? And can the phenomenological tradition, dedicated to the systematic study of human experience, and contemporary analytic approaches in philosophy help us out of some of the impasses that have bedevilled the empiricist tradition?" "Models of the Self includes all these perspectives in an attempt to cast light on one of the most intractable problems in science and the humanities. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.

Embodied souls, ensouled bodies

Marc Cortez

The book explores the relationship between Christology and theological anthropology through the lens provided by the theology of Karl Barth and the mind/body discussion in contemporary philosophy of mind. It thus comprises two major sections. The first develops an understanding of Karl Barth's theological anthropology focusing on three major facets: (1) the centrality of Jesus Christ for any real understanding of human persons; (2) the resources that such a christologically determined view of human nature has for engaging in interdisciplinary discourse; and (3) the ontological implications of this approach for understanding the mind/body relationship. The second part draws on this theological foundation to consider the implications that Christological anthropology has for analyzing and assessing several prominent ways of explaining the mind/body relationship. Specifically, it interacts with two broad categories of theories: 'nonreductive' forms of physicalism and 'holistic' forms of dualism. After providing a basic summary of each, the book applies the insights gained from Barth's anthropology to ascertain the extent to which the two approaches may be considered christologically adequate

Three Magic Words

U.S. Andersen

The pages of Three Magic Words, you will learn of the unlimited power that is yours. You will learn how you can turn this power to work for you, here on earth, to make your life majestic and overflowing with good. Three Magic Words is not a religion or a sect or a society. In its entirety it is a series of essays aimed at revealing to you your power over all things. You will learn that there is only one mover in all creation and that mover is thought. You will learn that there is only one creator and that creator is the Universal Subconscious Mind, or God. You will learn that this creator creates for you exactly what you think, and you will be shown how you can control your thoughts, not only to obtain answers to your problems but to create in your experience exactly what you desire.