Perplexity and Knowledge: An Inquiry Into the Structures of Questioning
In making his distinction between revisionary and descriptive metaphysics, P.F. Strawson wrote that the former has some value provided that its "partial vision" is at the service of the latter, "which needs no justification at all beyond that of inquiry in general." (Individuals, p. 9) Perhaps we feel no need to ask what justification there is for inquiry in general. But if we do recognize any such need, then we discover that inquiry is self-justifying. The more I put it into question, the more I bring the theme of my inquiry to light in my performance of inquiring. Questioning is the business of philosophers. They are now content to leave the search for detailed information to experts in the various disciplines that have won their independence from philosophy. The questioning a philosopher conducts is of the 'second-order'. He asks about the status of various sorts of questions, the types of knowledge they yield and of con fusion into which they lead.
Publisher: Springer
Published: Netherlands, 12 October 2011
Format: Paperback, 246 pages
Age Range: 15+
Other Information: biography
Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.6 x 1.4 centimeters (0.40 kg)
Writer: Malcolm Clark
Promotional InformationSpringer Book Archives
Table of ContentsI The Viewpoint of Inquiry.- I: Alternative Accounts.- 1 Mind Observed.- 2 Mind as Agent.- II: Duality and Self-Correction.- 3 Fact and Interpretation.- 4 Content and Performance.- 5 Appearance and Reality.- 6 Sense and Intellect.- II Historical Notes on the Form of Inquiry.- III: Scepticism and Negative Proof.- 7 The Sceptic as Teacher.- 8 Arguments and Replies.- 9 The Groundwork of Reply.- IV: Plato and the Forms of Geometry.- 10 Ideas at Work.- 11 Ideas Observed.- 12 Particular and Universal.- V: Aristotle and the Forms of Life.- 13 Form and Development.- 14 "Stages on Life's Way".- 15 Aristotelianism and Analogy.- VI: Descartes and Reflection.- 16 "The Chain of Numbers".- 17 Thinking and Thought.- 18 The Price of Certitude.- VII: Empiricists and Experience.- 19 The Dispassionate Observer.- 20 The Elusive Object.- 21 The Performance of Observing.- 22 The Limits of Experience.- VIII: Kant and the Uses of Reason.- 23 The Tribunal of Reason.- 24 "The Fruitful Bathos of Experience".- 25 The Viewpoint of the Critic.- 26 Objectivity and Order.- 27 The Responsibility of Reason.- III Outlines for a Critique of Questioning.- IX: Perplexity and Progress.- 28 The Question of Beginning.- 29 The Situation of the Questioner.- 30 Challenge and Coherence.- 31 Structure and Development.- X: Sense.- 32 Situation.- 33 Temporality.- 34 Spatiality.- XI: Intellect.- 35 Identity.- 36 Universality.- 37 Order.- XII: Practical Reason.- 38 Agency.- 39 Freedom.- 40 Morality.- 41 Personality.- 42 Mortality.