Immediatezza e mediazione della conoscenza dell'essere: Riflessioni sull'epistemologia di E. Coreth e B. Lonergan
In this essay some epistemological questions are considered, in which Coreth's Metaphysics and Lonergan's Insight seem to part company. The first point concerns the objectivity and transcendence of human knowledge. According to Lonergan the real question to be clarified regards the way we...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | Italian |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Ed. Pontificia Univ. Gregoriana
1972
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| In: |
Gregorianum
Year: 1972, Volume: 53, Issue: 1, Pages: 45-87 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In this essay some epistemological questions are considered, in which Coreth's Metaphysics and Lonergan's Insight seem to part company. The first point concerns the objectivity and transcendence of human knowledge. According to Lonergan the real question to be clarified regards the way we reach knowledge of being, and not so much the way we reach the other, starting from the knowledge of the subject as would be the case in an immediate intuition. Now knowledge of being occurs always in a rational judgment. Secondly, the starting point of our knowledge of being is, according to Lonergan, the notion of being; according to Coreth, it is pure pre-knowledge of being which constitutes our a priori horizon of being. Where do we get this pure pre-knowledge of being from? Lonergan's answer is that the self-presence which is found in all psychological acts and which is the consciousness as self-experience is by identity our notion of being, since it is a self-presence of an intelligently and rationally conscious dynamic orientation. Coreth is inclined, it would seem, to think of this self-presence as of a knowledge of the self formally as being. Therefore while for Lonergan a knowledge of being suffices which is merely heuristic, a mere anticipation, inasmuch as it is nothing else than the intelligence and reasonableness of our dynamic orientation, Coreth conceives our self-experience as a knowledge that already possesses that which is known — namely the questioning subject known as being. In this sense I would say that Coreth's transcendental reduction didn't go so far as to acknowledge the a priori character of our notion of being in all its truth. To speak of an immediate intuition of being in our consciousness, whence our horizon of being would have its origin, is to conceive being as primarily and originally the « already in here now » of extroverted consciousness. Thirdly, the process from our a priori, which is the notion of being, to the knowledge of any being, always takes place through experience, understanding and judgment. One must therefore distinguish between knowledge as mediated and knowledge as structured. Clearly our notion of being is neither mediated nor structured, although it is indeed the origin of our cognitional structure. But our knowledge of being is always a structure; that means, negatively, that it never occurs through some intuition which would be other than our understanding the data and our critical reflection upon what we have understood. This knowledge as structure will be immediate or mediated according as the being which is known by going beyond the data, is the being of the same data, or is the being of something else, which is in connection with the being whose data we have, and which therefore we reach through some kind of inferential understanding. |
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: Gregorianum
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