Forms of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 026820618X ISBN 13: 9780268206185

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022

Synopsis

Forms of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge addresses a philosophical subject―the nature of truth and knowledge―but treats it in a way that draws on insights beyond the usual confines of modern philosophy. This ambitious collection includes contributions from established scholars in philosophy, theology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, psychology, literary criticism, history, and architecture. It represents an attempt to integrate the insights of these disciplines and to help them probe their own basic presuppositions and methods.

The essays in Forms of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge are collected into five parts, the first dealing with division of knowledge into multiple disciplines in Western intellectual history; the second with the foundational disciplines of epistemology, logic, and mathematics; the third with explanation in the natural sciences; the fourth with truth and understanding in disciplines of the humanities; and the fifth with art and theology.

Contributors: Vittorio Hösle, Keith Lehrer, Robert Hanna, Laurent Lafforgue, Thomas Nowak, Francisco J. Ayala, Zygmunt Pizlo, Osborne Wiggins, Allan Gibbard, Carsten Dutt, Aviezer Tucker, Nicola Di Cosmo, Michael Lykoudis, and Celia Deane-Drummond.

About this title

About the Author

Vittorio Hösle is Paul G. Kimball Chair of Arts and Letters in the Department of German Languages and Literatures and concurrent professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame. He was the founding director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and a Hermeneutics (2012) and Morals and Politics (2004), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 2008 in the belief that every research university needs a place where scholars come together so as to be inspired by colleagues in disciplines different from their own. There is no doubt that the subdivision of universities into departments is reasonable: given the increase of knowledge in every discipline, controlling the quality of work in a given academic field presupposes expertise in that field. At the same time, the dangers connected with this departmentalization of knowledge are various. For example, people may simply ignore what occurs outside of their own fields. Sometimes this may not affect the quality of their research; sometimes, however, this leads them to miss opportunities to connect their own studies with those of others and thus achieve more general insights. This danger is particularly menacing whenever basic insights are ignored that have repercussions for more applied research. As physics cannot pro gress without mathematics, so also the humanities, to give only one example, inevitably operate with basic philosophical categories, such as meaning or value; the lack of an explicit reflection on these concepts does not mean that they are not presupposed. On the contrary, the less reflection occurs, the more likely the concepts used are imprecise and perhaps even inconsistent. But the disconnect of philosophy from the other disciplines is due not only to the specialization of those disciplines: philosophy itself has, to a considerable degree, given up its ambition to address a larger audience and withdrawn into very technical problems that are of interest only to “specialists of the universal,” as one could call such philosophers. The decline of public intellectuals, the topic of the Institute’s 2013 annual conference, which was organized by Michael Desch, who will edit the corresponding volume, is a necessary consequence of this development―one with dangerous consequences for politics: without the advocacy of public intellectuals, the political system is far more likely to be manipulated by populists and those terribles simplificateurs in the mass media who care more for advertising revenue than the truth.

Its three inaugural conferences in 2010, 2011, and 2012 were, together with the residential life of scholars working on research projects that deal with questions both interdisciplinary and normative, the two foci of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. These three conferences addressed the three concepts that have often been considered by the philosophical tradition the most fundamental―namely, beauty, goodness, and truth―by bringing together scholars from as many disciplines as could fruitfully interact in three days. The first two volumes, The Many Faces of Beauty and Dimensions of Goodness, appeared in 2013 with the University of Notre Dame Press and Cambridge Scholar Publishers respectively; this volume on conceptions of truth and the unity of knowledge completes the trilogy. The participants of the three conferences did not overlap―with the exception of myself: as founding director of the Institute from 2008 to 2013, I contributed to these three volumes three essays that complement one another. Those invited to the conference on truth were chosen to represent philosophy―including epistemology, logic, and ethics―theology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, psychology, literary criticism, historiography, and architecture. They hailed not only from the United States but also from Israel and various European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and one essay deals with the Chinese contribution to the concept of history. The essays in this volume are collected in five parts, the first dealing with the historical development of the tree of knowledge; the second with the foundational disciplines of epistemology, logic, and mathematics; the third with explanation in the natural sciences; the fourth with introspection and understanding in those disciplines dealing with humans; and the fifth with the contribution of art and religion.

Some of the common, overarching questions that the contributors to this volume address are these: By which different methods do the various disciplines achieve knowledge of truth? What is common to their methods, and what distinguishes them? Are some disciplines more foundational than others, that is, can they be understood on their own while the others presuppose them? Which forms of knowledge influence each other, and which disciplines have very little overlap? Are there different ontological realms connected with the various epistemological activities? And since it is impossible to give up the belief that the various disciplines contribute to an ultimately coherent vision of reality, how should we imagine this tree of knowledge?

Vittorio Hösle’s essay, “How Did the Western Culture Subdivide Its Various Forms of Knowledge and Justify Them? Historical Reflections on the Metamorphoses of the Tree of Knowledge,” gives an overview of how Western culture has grouped its various disciplines from antiquity to the present, often under the metaphor of the tree of knowledge, which points to the common roots and thus to the underlying unity of all knowledge. It starts with reflections on the budding of new and the withering of old branches of that tree, partly due to the uncovering of unsuspected strata of reality and partly thanks to the development of new theoretical tools―tools that occasionally allow the unification of disciplines that earlier were regarded as independent. The development of the tree is not always caused by empirical discoveries: shifts in philo sophical categorization based on purely theoretical arguments also help to explain the various shapes that the tree of knowledge has assumed in its history. Within ancient philosophy, the first insight into different types of knowledge comes with the Eleatic school’s distinction between the way of opinion and the way of truth. Plato builds upon this distinction and connects it to the subdivision of the mathematical disciplines―even while pointing to a fundamental difference between philosophy and mathematics. A thinker as early as Xenocrates proposes

the subdivision of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics―a subdivision that would become canonical within Stoicism―but it is Aristotle to whom we owe the most elaborate system of knowledge of antiquity: theoretical knowledge encompasses physics, mathematics, and theology; practical knowledge, ethics and politics; and poietical knowledge, poetics and several other less important subdisciplines. Logic, however, is difficult to fit into this tripartition: in Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalion, it will form a fourth part. The two main works from the Middle Ages analyzed in the essay are Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam and Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae. Important in Bonaventure is the attempt to include the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric into this system as well as the insertion of economics― that is, the discipline of the management of a family―between ethics and politics. The climax of all knowledge is a theology based on the fourfold interpretation of scripture. In early modernity, Francis Bacon proposed the most articulate and influential system of disciplines based on the three faculties of memory, imagination, and reason. However, his system is soon challenged by Descartes’s radical separation of the knowledge of extended substances from that of thinking substances, which splits any science of humans in two and raises the difficult question of how we may have knowledge of other selves, since introspection is limited to oneself. In the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico proposed the idea of a new science that addresses human culture, understood as a realm beyond those of nature and the mind. The essay then explores the subtle alterations of the Baconian system in Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s introductory “Discours” to the Encyclopédie and delves into Kant’s epistemological challenge and his idea of a new systematization of knowledge, which was elaborated by the greatest encyclopedist among the German Idealists, namely, Hegel, who recognizes, against Bacon and d’Alembert and anticipating Frege and Hus serl, the irreducibility of logic to any other discipline. Hegel’s subdivision is finally contrasted with the almost simultaneous one by Auguste Comte, who had an enormous impact on the structure of nineteenth-century universities by conceptualizing the peculiar status of engineering and having his doctrine of the sciences culminate in the new discipline of sociology.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026820618X
• ISBN 13: 9780268206185
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 366
• Editor: Hösle Vittorio