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 as a result of a development in literate intellectual culture culminating in the dualistic philosophy of Rene Descartes. This conception and manner of thinking have spawned a reductionist view of persons and have tainted the personal with connotations of bias, and partiality, and privacy, leaving us with the presumption that, if we seek to be objective, we must expunge the personal from the stage of intellectual respectability. Poteats 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.
This book will be of interest to a broad range of intellectual readers, with interests in philosophy, psychology, theology, and the humanities.
This book explores aspects of William H. Poteats philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.
