Knowledge, ancient and Modern

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 m 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.

 

 

Return to Top