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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 is culminates in the dualistic philosophy of Rene
Descartes. This dualism has spawned a reductionist view of persons
and tainted "the personal" with connotations of bias, partiality,
and privacy, leaving us with the presumption that if we seek to be
objective and intellectually respectable, we must expunge the
personal. William H. Poteat's 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. The twelve contributors in this collection explore
outgrowths and implications of Poteat's thought. Recovering the
Personal will be of interest to a broad range of intellectual
readers with interests in philosophy, psychology, theology, and the
humanities.
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