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What Has History to Do with Philosophy? Insights from the Medieval Contemplative Tradition
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Dyke, Christina Van |
| Copyright Year | 2018 |
| Abstract | the fIeld of the hIStory of philosophy is rife with disagreements about its own nature. While some scholars work actively to bring historical figures and ideas into conversation with contemporary debates, other scholars cry 'Violence!' and dismiss their work as anachronistic. At the same time, detailed textual reconstruction and analysis are discounted by others as philology rather than philosophy, and demand is made for 'Arguments!' These disagreements have, in turn, shaped the ways in which historians of philosophy have interacted (or not interacted) with contemporary philosophers. Too often, the contribution of historically oriented philosophers to modern discussions has been reduced to volunteering ideological nuggets mined from ancient sources, or to explicating theories whose value stems in part from their very lack of connection to current interests.1 This chapter highlights a different corrective and complementary role that historically informed philosophy can play in contemporary discussions. Analysis of the development of key definitions, concepts, principles, and so on, often illuminates problematic prejudices that call for a re-examination of the philosophical considerations in their favour—a re-examination that should involve looking at the relevant historical context in which the idea developed. In what follows, I demonstrate, via the case study of medieval and modern conceptions of mystical experience, that turning to the relevant historical context can also provide viable philosophical resources with which to complement existing discussions. What it takes for an experience to count as genuinely mystical has been the source of significant controversy; most current philosophical definitions of 'mystical experience' exclude embodied, non-unitive states, but, in so doing, they exclude the majority of reported mystical experiences. I use a reexamination of the full range of reported medieval mystical experiences—both |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.5871/bacad/9780197266298.003.0010 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://philarchive.org/archive/VANWHH-4 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad%2F9780197266298.003.0010 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
