[Download] "William Poteat: The Primacy of the Person (Report)" by Appraisal " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: William Poteat: The Primacy of the Person (Report)
- Author : Appraisal
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 191 KB
Description
1. Poteat and his Problem William H. Poteat (1919-2000) spent most of his career as Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Duke University, though he also taught philosophy at the University of North Carolina, taught at an Episcopal seminary, and held visiting professorships at Stanford and Texas. 2 Through his co-editing of a major collection of essays on Michael Polanyi's thought, and the supervision of numerous doctoral dissertations on Polanyi and others concerned with the issue of personal knowing, Poteat was prepared at the end of his career publish three volumes of his reflections, and assist with a volume of his essays published over thirty-year period.3 What is distinctive about Poteat's intellectual life is the persistent, tenacious focus on the problem of finding a suitable home within the modern ethos for the human person, a home that would allow that person to claim his or her knowledge, belief, actions and creations as real, as true, as full of meaning as they are prior to entering upon reflection about them. In his doctoral dissertation on 'Pascal's Conception of Man and Modern Sensibility' (Duke, 1951), Poteat opposed Pascal's search for the esprit de finesse behind our rational powers to Descartes' claim that the esprit de geometrique lay behind such powers. He later recalled that 'Here was shaped for me the problem that has occupied me now for more than thirty years: the nature of rationality and logic in an intellectual climate in which Descartes' legatees have prevailed and left us culturally insane.' (4) What is this problem with Cartesian rationality and logic, whose effects would merit the charge of 'insanity'?