International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
We have first to determine the underlying structure of the
classification, that is, we have to seek the chief Divisions, of which
our plan shows seven; four theoretical and three practical ones. It will
be a secondary task to subdivide them later into the 24 Departments and
128 Sections. We desire to divide the whole of knowledge in a
fundamental way, and we must therefore start with the question of
principle:--what is knowledge? This question belongs to epistemology,
and thus falls, indeed, into the domain of philosophy. The positivist is
easily inclined to substitute for the philosophical problem the
empirical question: how did that which we call knowledge grow and
develop itself in our individual mind, or in the mind of the nations?
The question becomes, then, of course, one which must be answered by
psychology, by sociology, and perhaps by biology. Such genetic inquiries
are certainly very important, and the problem of how the processes of
judging and conceiving and thinking are produced in the individual or
social consciousness, and how they are to be explained through physical
and psychical causes, deserves fullest attention. But its solution
cannot even help us as regards the fundamental problem, what we mean by
knowledge, and what the ultimate value of knowledge may be, and why we
seek it. This deeper logical inquiry must be answered somehow before
those genetic studies of the psychological and the sociological
positivists can claim any truth at all, and thus any value, for their
outcome. To explain our present knowledge genetically from its foregoing
causes means merely to connect the present experience, which we know,
with a past experience, which we remember, or with earlier phenomena
which we construct on the basis of theories and hypotheses; but in any
case with facts which we value as parts of our knowledge and which thus
presuppose the acknowledgment of the value of knowledge. We cannot
determine by linking one part of knowledge with another part of
knowledge whether we have a right to speak of knowledge at all and to
rely on it.
We can thus not start from the childhood of man, or from the beginning
of humanity, or from any other object of knowledge, but we must begin
with the state which logically precedes all knowledge; that is, with our
immediate experience of real life. Here, in the naïve experience in
which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where
we feel ourselves in our subjective attitudes as agents of will, as
personalities, here we find the original reality not yet shaped and
remoulded by scientific conceptions and by the demands of knowledge. And
from this basis of primary, naïve reality we must ask ourselves what we
mean by seeking knowledge, and how this demand of ours is different from
the other activities in which we work out the meaning and the ideals of
our life.
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