All I asked was, "What are you writing about?" This comes from an old college friend of mine. She wrote:

The thesis is specialized, so it's better and more practical (not to mention less time/energy consuming at any one time) to lead you into it a little at a time. That way, you can always say (particularly if your stomach acts up again): "That's enough for me." None of what follows is actually the subject of my paper or thesis. I'm just starting to set a context for you. Actually, it helps me to try to articulate this for someone who isn't doing this kind of work right now. It's good teaching experience. So thanks for asking.

First step: One thing that we "know for sure" in intellectual history is that as the sixteenth century moved into the seventeenth century, there was a huge shift in the approach to "foundations of knowledge." By the seventeenth century (with Bacon, Locke, Port Royal Logic, The Academy of Science), the turn was away from the traditions that had tried to establish theoretical ground rules for how human beings can "know the world" to the beginnings of faith and hope that "science" would provide certain knowledge (focusing on induction rather than deduction, observation and experiment rather than rational thought).

If you think back to your reading in Plato, Aristotle, the sophists, you know that some of the prototypical debates were already up and running in fifth century B.C. Greece (and earlier actually) about the following: epistemology (how do human beings "know" the world and how could they know that they know), ontology (what is the essence of Being. Notice Being is a metaphysic, a UNITY, not a practical sense of individual things), and axiology (what is the Good, in short ethics). While Plato (with his whole transcendent metaphysic of eternal forms known/intuited by the soul) and Aristotle (with his emphasis on concrete things in the world) debated these issues in formal philosophical terms, the sophists (rhetoricians) claimed that the kind of certainty about epistemology, ontology, and axiology that Philosophy (Sophia) wanted to define was impossible. The sophistic approach looked to rhetoric (as practical wisdom--Phronesis) and the world of human affairs, preferring to focus their energies on constructing useful arguments that could be applied to the world. They generally accepted that knowledge/truth is NEVER certain or unitary; it is rather contingent and contextual. (Of course this is an over generalization: all three ways of going at these things overlapped. Each "position" had to take the other two into account and try to accommodate them.)

In the medieval period, classical Knowledge/documents/texts were "lost" (except for some works by Aristotle and Plato and a few others), and Christian theology ruled the day. Medieval scholastics were busy working on these same issues, trying to synthesize what they knew of Aristotle and Plato with Christian theology. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine are biggies here, but so too are others such as William of Ockham (you've probably heard of Ockham's razor), Duns Scotus and other professional intellectuals of the medieval academy. These medieval debates took up issues that the ancients had started.

Some of the most difficult ones involved philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. Let's take philosophy of mind first. The central question is how can an incorporeal "mind" or "soul" KNOW a corporeal thing. How does that material stuff get into an immaterial KNOWER? Remember these are the days before physics, neurology etc. were "formed" sciences--so what you have are debates, discussions that are VERY particular about trying to describe exactly what that process was like. Theological concepts, metaphysical "entities," hypotheses about natural/material processes and the "spiritual" function of anatomical organs are all jumbled up together.

The medieval scholastics proposed a notion (that was actually an extension of ideas from Western classical thinkers as well as Eastern ones) that there was a "causal chain of light" that lead from the THING in some way to specific places in the mind. I won't go into all of this, but if you remember the physiology of the time, you recall that it included a vegetable, sensible, and incorporeal soul---all three. They had to get all three of things to connect up PHYSICALLY. One major approach involved the theoretical notion that inanimate objects emitted particles of some kind (came to be known as species) that then traveled through the ray of light that entered the eye, was passed through various anatomical places in the nerves to the brain. (I know this is detailed, but I find the attempts to grope toward articulating this process in language that hasn't been "codified" or formalized in science and that preserves theological/metaphysical concepts fascinating). The species finally lodged in the virtus distinctiva (that part of the mind/body that judges).

To move away from the technical process for a minute and make this meaningful let me back out and say that the whole theory tried to account for sensation, that is, how ACCURATELY do our senses transfer the stuff of the world to our "minds." Well, of course, they knew as well as we do that they don't always do that "accurately" at all. When you put your hand in a cold water bath and then plunge it into one containing hot water, you don't "accurately" sense the water temperature of the second. Another example: when you look at something far away, it seems tiny; the eye does not "accurately" perceive the size of the thing. (Remember that the science of optics did not have an established paradigm until Newton's Optica in the second half of the seventeenth century).

So, with respect to epistemology, SENSATION was one big problematic area because human beings don't seem to be designed to register the world OBJECTIVELY but rather SUBJECTIVELY through their various organs of sense which clearly sometimes DECEIVE. That is a big problem. It puts human beings OUTSIDE reality in a way that common sense experience of life ignores. Sense don't let people "know the true nature of a thing."

Medieval scholastics debated various versions of this causal chain of light theory because, if you read the above closely, there were all kinds of problems right at the central crux--that is where the PHYSICAL connects with the INCORPOREAL mind or soul. Some thought that the SPECIES that the THING emitted was itself incorporeal. (That meant its nature matched the IMMATERIAL mind and could "get in.") See how this connects up with ontology (the nature of Being)? Do "things" have "essences," transcendent ways of being? Do all cats have an "essence" of Catness? (Plato would have said yes and it was relatively easy for him because of his notion of eternal forms. Aristotle tried to explain the same thing by talking about something he called "Substance," a kind of being that "underlay" everything but that only existed in particular things.

The Substance of Catness did not exist in an Absolute form, but it was part of everything called "cat" and people could know that. You can see the problems in that too. How can Substance be everywhere at once? Etc. Etc.)

Anyway, back to the nature of the SPECIES. If the species is material how can it get into the immaterial mind? If the species is incorporeal, HOW CAN IT BE IDENTICAL WITH THE THING IT "FLEW OFF OF"? If the mind only knows an
incorporeal species, doesn't it follow that the mind can only know "things" indirectly? And if the mind only does that, its knowledge is PSYCHOLOGICAL not actual. Is color, for example, a property of the THING or of the MIND? Notice that redness is an attribute that human beings give to a thing because that is what they perceive. A person blind from birth does not experience things as red (or black or whatever). Does "redness" come from the thing or from the mind? Is the mind's perception something "real" or something "psychological"?

You get the drift.

All of these issues connect with contemporary debates about the same kinds of things. Yes, science has formalized things, clarified things, agreed on basic vocabularies and systems, etc., but the fundamental question of whether human beings "know" the world or are absolutely excluded from it (or something in the middle) is one of the most important subjects of inquiry for cognitive science/cognitive psychology. And contemporary skeptical PHILOSOPHY
(postmodernism) has already determined that human beings can't, don't, never will "know" reality, regardless of "science." Science, in fact, has clinched the argument (what is the "nature" of reality? mathematical? If so, human beings don't perceive it.)

Contemporary philosophical REALISTS still believe that human beings are designed to know the world. Their point of view is the underdog; they have a great deal of trouble countering skeptical arguments which have become VERY powerful. PRAGMATISM (an American development see Dewey, James, Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam more on the "realist" or "empirical side; Rorty, Fish on the skeptical or postmodern side) is a way of negotiating the middle. Pragmatism isn't really a philosophy; it is an antiphilosophy. It focuses on human practice (praxis) rather than on theoretical speculation.

See the connection with ancient sophistry? It accepts that our knowledge of the world is contingent and contextual, but unlike postmodern skepticism, it doesn't see that as a problem. (That's very simple but this is getting too long.) We live, in short, in a rhetorical universe, not in the material one. The "god" claims of science (and the hopes of science that we can "know" the world through mathematical, observational, experimental method) can't give us any answer about the "Truth" of the world. Science's claims to "objectivity" are nonsense.

Back, very briefly to the philosophy of language (now that I "covered" philosophy of mind): While our senses are one way we "know" the world, language is another. The same problems arise here. Instead of asking how sensation "connects up" with the world, though, here we have to ask how the word "connects up" with the thing. That's all I'll say for now.

Sorry about all of that. I started enjoying myself; I haven't tried to explain this whole thing from the ground up to anyone for a long time. That doesn't mean I even expect you to read the whole thing, let alone ask for more. If you do want me to go on, the next step is to talk about Renaissance humanism and its revival of the importance of rhetoric, the techniques they used to train students, and the ways in which rhetorical education (though supposedly serving the Christian view or any foundationally grounded view of the world) creates a tension between certainty and skepticism.

Then that lets me move to Shakespeare.

Uncle already? I'll sign off now. I have to make lesson plans for eighth and ninth grade classroom activities. Sigh.

She was always the better student.
 

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