Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Simone Kotva makes several important claims in her response, which describes the necessity of intuition for the work of the analytic-synthetic mind.I hinted at, but did not develop, two points.She notes that intuition and reason must work together to achieve knowledge capable of acting in the world.She also points to the essential dimension of human formation; humans are creatures of habit and must be properly disposed to the world.To be properly disposed, one must inculcate habits.I am in full agreement.To Kotva's first point, I neglected to emphasize the fact that every human mind is a unity of intuition and reason.I avoided the term "reason" because it leans toward an essentialist view of mind.Reason is imagined as a faculty of mind, a noun.I used the term analytic-synthetic mind because it points toward the activity of reasoning-analyzing and synthesizing.Likewise, I prefer to think of intuition as the activity of sensing.The work of intuition is the work of mediation between our ways of thinking (the result of the analytic-synthetic activity) and the realities of the world that are also in action.Any single human mind, then, is a unity of activity, always engaged in sensing the world through intuition and analyzing and synthetically modeling the realities that the unified mind engages.Thus, I should have emphasized the fact that the mind is a unity engaged in two activities, both intuiting the world and modeling it.There is a flowing relationship between these two activities, which are always mingled together.In the history of the West, we have emphasized the rational side of the mind.Reason has taken pride of place in philosophy broadly construed, and especially in natural philosophy or science.Thus, the building of elaborate metaphysical systems of thought was the task of philosophy.It became the task of the empirical turn in natural philosophy, or what we today call science.The power of "science" became ubiquitous such that many subdisciplines of philosophy wanted to become "sciences."Political philosophy shifted to political science; economics (once a subdiscipline of moral philosophy) became a science.Even moral philosophy in some circles came to be thought of as moral science.In fact, Bertrand Russell's intervention was to make the work of mainstream philosophy more like that of the work of science.Theology followed suit.Theology-even before philosophy-became systematic theology or moral theology or pastoral theology, all emphasizing the analytic-synthetic activity of mind, systematizing everything from Christology to pneumatology.Metaphorically,
Source: Modern Theology
DOI: 10.1111/moth.70010
Author: Jeffrey P. Bishop
Institution: Saint Louis University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4412914991