Our Ontological Baggage: Charles Taylor’s Account for Modernity’s False Conception of Self
The character of modernity has led us to have freedom from a set of moral restrictions. Our ’self’ is no longer suppressed and labelled as any one particular thing. I’m not just an insurance salesman, man, I’m also interested in social and political philosophy. There is a considerable amount that we have lost with the shedding of these supposedly oppressive labels, and more distressing is what have we have ‘gained’. Continue reading ‘Our Ontological Baggage’
This was a mid-term paper I wrote in April of 2007. It is an examination of T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics. I had forgotten about it, and while digging through my old material I happened upon it and was extremely impressed with myself. It’s probably one of my favourite things that I’ve written. This midterm paper entire encapsulates what I’m attempting to draw out in my thesis on Charles Taylor and I think really benefits the ‘Holism’ project I’ve been trying to articulate recently. I intend to go back through several of my old papers throughout my research this term and will let other projects happening here fall to a lower priority while I’m finishing my honours degree. I hope these coming updates will still be entertaining.
If You Can Read This, You Are Already Presupposing Many Complex Conceptual Frameworks.
In the Prolegomena to Ethics T.H. Green, speaking to us from 1883, offers a different way of thinking about what a person is. What Green seems to salvage (and by ‘salvage’, I mean ‘preemptively prescribe’) is an account of the individual that is neither isolated from the exterior world, nor biologically determined to carry out their pre-set performances. For Green, a person is not an empty vessel, and knowledge is not a substance in which it might contain. We have rich and developed set of tools as soon on as we are conscious. Continue reading ‘If You Can Read This, You Are Already Presupposing Many Complex Conceptual Frameworks.’
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