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Search - Frontiers of Consciousness: Interdiscilipinary Studies in American Philosophy and Poetry

Frontiers of Consciousness Interdiscilipinary Studies in American Philosophy and Poetry
Author: Stanley Scott

Frontiers of Consciousness is a study of the problem of consciousness in a historic period of revolutionary change, and an authentic example of "interdisciplinary studies." The book contains a wealth of insight into the conceptual interrelationships between the work of the American philosophers who have been called the Builders (William James, ... more »Josiah Royce, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the work of three great modernist poets (T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams). The book effectively demonstrates a startling point: that the Builders in American philosophy and these poets (among others) who followed them were all at work on a common project: to deconstruct the principle of epistemological dualism, which had been a cornerstone of modern culture since Descartes, and to replace it with a new holistic model of experience. What Scott shows with stunning clarity is that the epistemological dualism – the belief that the human mind and the world are separate realms of being – is a paradigmatic expression, useful for some analytical purposes, but having no claim to fundamental truth. Using the concept of paradigms, devised by Thomas Kuhn to describe basic structures of thought and assumptions in specific periods of the history of science, Scott traces in the writings of American philosophers and poets a central historical theme that he calls, following William Ernest Hocking, "passage beyond modernity." This term is used by Scott as a name for a major structural change in thought registered in the poetry and philosophy of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This structural change, from the dualism characteristic of the mainstream of modern culture since Descartes to a view of consciousness based on a holistic process – model of experience – is brilliantly compared to the type of changes in scientific thinking that Kuhn calls paradigm shifts. In a powerful concluding chapter, Scott shows how the work of another great American philosopher, Richard Rorty, may serve as a guide to the deconstruction of modern epistemological dualism. But in Scott’s view, though Rorty takes the fundamental step prefigured by James and Dewey toward dismantling the spectator theory of knowledge, his work is lacking in another crucial element found prominently in Hocking’s thought. That is the emphasis on participation as a fundamental mode of experience, which lead Hocking to his prophetic articulation of an empiricism of meaning. The theme of empiricism of meaning links the philosophy of the Builders with the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and Williams, and leads all of them through the historical process called passage beyond modernity.

ISBN-13: 9780823213023
ISBN-10: 0823213021
Publication Date: 1/1/1991
Pages: 156
Rating:

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Publisher: Fordham University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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