Charles Taylor explains the contrast between Ancient/medieval and Modern conceptions
of knowledge like this:
"Thought and feeling - the psychological - are now confined [after the
Cartesian revolution] to minds.
This follows our disengagement from the world, its 'disenchantment',
in Weber's phrase. As long as the order of things embodies an ontic logos, then
ideas and valuations are also seen as located in the world, and not just in
subjects. Indeed their privileged status is in the cosmos, or perhaps beyond
it, in the realm of Ideas in which both world and soul participate. This is
the disposition of things, which underlies the theories of knowledge of Plato
and Aristotle. When Aristotle says that ' actual knowledge is identical with
its object', or 'the activity of the sensible object and that of the percipient
sense is one and the same activity, and yet the distinction between their being
remains' he is operating with a conception of knowing that is far removed from
the representational construal that becomes dominant with Descartes and Locke.
Knowledge comes when the action of the Forms in shaping the real coincides with
its action in shaping my intelligence (nous). True knowledge, true valuation,
is not exclusively located in the subject. In a sense one might say that their
paradigm location is in reality; correct human knowledge and valuation comes
from our connecting ourselves rightly to the significance things already have
ontically. In another sense, one might say that true knowledge and valuation
only arise when the connection comes about. In either case, these two - to us
- "psychological" activities are ontically situated.
Taylor, Sources of the Self, p.186.
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