Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The oldest and most traditional is the religious or theological , which takes its point of departure from sacred doctrine and in the case of the “higher religions,” from a sacred text or texts. Bracketing the question of their sacred status, these doctrines provide hypotheses of origin , or more generally, anthropologies in which the essence of the human may be laid out in some detail, particularly in its ethical dimension. The second way of thinking about the human is the philosophical or metaphysical . In its systematic form, metaphysics dates from Plato, who built his ontology on the givenness of the declarative sentence or proposition , that is, of mature language detached from its roots in originary, ostensive language. Since the late nineteenth century, traditional metaphysics, which follows Plato in positing its fundamental ontology a priori, has been succeeded by phenomenology , which extends Cartesian doubt to the totality of empirical knowledge, so that the individual, whose certitude is limited to the contents of his consciousness, elaborates what we would call his own anthropology on the basis of intuition and introspective evidence. Phenomenology denies a basis in psychology and more generally in any physical substrate; it is concerned with the contents of consciousness, not with the emotional or neurological mechanisms that are the internal yet still worldly correlates of these contents.”

— Eric Gans, A New Way of Thinking · Saturday, January 26th, 2008 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment