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Plato's tripartite division of the soul, Descartes's criterion of
clear and distinct ideas, and Kant's notion of the categorical imperative
attest, philosophy has traditionally been wedded to rationalism and
its "intellectualist" view of persons. In this book Christopher
Williams seeks to wean his fellow philosophers away from an overly
rationalistic self-understanding by using resources that are available
within the philosophical tradition itself, including some that anticipate
strands of Nietzsche's thought.
The book begins by developing Hume's critique of rationalism, with
reference especially to the section of the Treatise that deals with
the continuing existence of bodies (an argument that subverts intellectualist
criteria by attempting to satisfy them) and to his neglected essay
"The Sceptic" where Hume reveals the importance of our
embodiment through a comic portrayal of philosophers' efforts to
"correct our sentiments." Then it moves on to ward off
charges of irrationalism by showing that, although our powers of
self-correction are more limited than the rationalist thinks they
are, a Humean position is able both to sustain a commitment to reflection
and to sensitize us to a version of irrationalism, manifest in monotheistic
theologies, that is otherwise difficult to detect. The book concludes,
more speculatively, with a comparison of persons to artworks in
order to show how our aesthetic dimension is the source of some
of the normative work previously assigned to rationalist reason.
Ranging as it does across subfields from epistemology and history
of philosophy to ethics and aesthetics, A Cultivated Reason should appeal to a wide audience of philosophers and to scholars
in other fields as well. |
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