Recovering the Personal: The Philosophical Anthropology of William H. Poteat

Description

Modernity has radically challenged the assumptions that guide our ordinary lives as persons, in ways we are not normally aware. We live our concrete lives taking for granted that personal decisions, desires, relationships, actions, aspirations, values, and knowledge are central to our existence. But in modernity, we think of these matters as private, idiosyncratic, and subjective, even irrational. This modern conception of ourselves and the associated way of reflection known as modern critical thinking came to dominate our thinking is culminates in the dualistic philosophy of René Descartes. This dualism has spawned a reductionist view of persons and tainted “the personal” with connotations of bias, partiality, and privacy, leaving us with the presumption that if we seek to be objective and intellectually respectable, we must expunge the personal. William H. Poteat’s work in philosophical anthropology has confronted this concern head on. He undertakes a radical critique of the various forms of mind-body dualism and materialist monism that have dominated Western intellectual concepts of the person. In a unique style that Poteat calls post-critical, he uncovers the staggering incoherencies of these dualisms and shows how they have resulted in a loss of the personal in the modern age. He also formulates a way out of this modern cultural insanity. This constructive dimension of his thought is centered on his signature concept of the mindbody, the pre-reflective ground of personal existence. The twelve contributors in this collection explore outgrowths and implications of Poteat’s thought. Recovering the Personal will be of interest to a broad range of intellectual readers with interests in philosophy, psychology, theology, and the humanities. Contents Acknowledgments Part I: Philosophical Anthropology Chapter One: Refinding the Personal Chapter Two: Why Is the Personal so Important? Chapter Three: Being Post-Critical Chapter Four: Critical Recollection Chapter Five: The Genealogy of Poteat’s Philosophical Anthropology Chapter Six: The Primacy of Persons Chapter Seven: Dethroning Epistemology Part II: Theological Considerations Chapter Eight: Personhood and the Problematic of Christianity Chapter Nine: Incarnational Theology Chapter Ten: Toward a Post-Critical Theology Part III: Aesthetic Considerations Chapter Eleven: Post-Critical Aesthetics Chapter Twelve: Paul Cézanne and the Numinous Power of the Real Bibliography Index Contributors