Friday, August 8, 2008

Peperzak on modern philosophy...

"...the philosophy that still dominates our institutions and manners... combines the following convictions:

1. Reason, as interpreted in the modern logic and methodology of rationality, is the supreme and and sovereign judge of reflective speech or writing.

2. Reason needs experience.

3. The experience that counts in the search for truth is a kind of experience that is, or can be had, by all people who have the normal use of the human senses... Paradigmatic for this kind of experience are indubitable sensations and scientific observation.

One basic element of the concrete quest for truth is emphatically silenced in these principles: the element I have called faith or trust. Modern philosophy ignores the decisive role of its own faith in reason, in science, and in certain criteria for evidence and trustworthy experience...

...modern philosophy does not show much interest in the religious, moral, and aesthetic spirituality from which a well- or badly-oriented, enthusiastic, moody, lazy, overheated, deathly boring, or hopeful thinking emerges... such a neglect has dramatic consequences for the course of a human life. If the practice of philosophy is a way of life, it cannot ignore the sources from which it in fact draws its energy, its desires and hopes and interests, its perseverance in the search, and so on.

...some schools continue to believe that we should restrict ourselves to indubitable impressions. They prefer not to consider the conditions of those more interesting experiences without which it is impossible to talk about genuine beauty, moral virtues, authenticity, love, phenomenality, and being."

Adriaan Peperzak - The Quest For Meaning

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