Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy

by Miner,Robert C.

• ISBN13: 9780415276986
• ISBN10: 0415276985
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-11-04
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Truth in the Makingrepresents a sophisticated effort to map the complex relations between human knowledge and creative power, as reflected across more than half a millennium of philosophical enquiry. Showing the intimacy of this problematic to the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Vico and David Lachterman, the book reveals how questions about creation apparently diluted by secularism in fact retain much of their potency today. If science could counterfeit or synthesize nature precisely from its smallest nuts and bolts, as Descartes and Hobbes implied and as modern science increasingly suggests, would it create an identical world to that we live in now Robert C. Miner offers a precise genealogy of modern thought on truth and creation: from medieval theology's identification of human creativity with divine initiative to the radical Leibnizian contention that human ideas are 'not little copies of God's', and may at once exceed mimesis and produce things new,unpredictable and unseen. He considers how the theological importance given to creation interacts historically with the secularisation and instrumentalisation of modes of discovery and method, and asks how knowledge is understood between different disciplines, from the allegorical discipline of poetry to the constructible field of mathematics. The book is an eloquent reminder of the ways in which theology continues to fling a wild card at philosophical understandings of reality, countering theories of metaphysical equivalence of the 'real' and 'artificial' with theologies in which human making is always fallible, and strives only for approximate participation in divine truth. As a strenuous and informative breakdown of leading theories of knowledge,Truth in the Makingshows the continuing influence of theological questions upon philosophical, scientific and aesthetic disciplines, whilst raising topical questions about the ultimate nature of our reality and our freedom to modify and define it.

Author Biography

Robert Miner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Honors College at Baylor University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Prologue	xi
1 Thomas Aquinas	1	(18)
Scientia Dei and creation	2	(5)
Creation and human production	7	(4)
Making and the "analogy of being"	11	(8)
2 Nicolaus Cusanus	19	(21)
The dramatic setting of the Idiota de Mente	20	(1)
Construction as manifestation of forms through image-making	21	(2)
Constructions of reason	23	(3)
The activity of mens: vis assimilativa and the construction of concepts	26	(5)
Activa creatio humanitatis: making as imaging of the divine exemplar	31	(9)
3 Francis Bacon	40	(20)
The Baconfan factum	40	(5)
Induction as constructive method	45	(5)
Limits on human making: Bacon's forms	50	(5)
For and against Bacon	55	(5)
4 René Descartes	60	(18)
The Cartesian factum	60	(5)
Representations as artifacts made from simple natures	65	(2)
The constitution of simple natures	67	(2)
Construction in the determination of quaestiones	69	(4)
The division of the Cartesian inheritance	73	(5)
5 Thomas Hobbes	78	(18)
The making of geometrical definitions	79	(6)
The commonwealth as feat of technical making	85	(7)
Science and power	92	(4)
6 Giambattista Vico	96	(30)
Making and truth	96	(4)
Abstraction as creation	100	(5)
Making within metaphysics	105	(3)
Making as imaginative mythopoesis	108	(5)
Making as the creation of elements	113	(6)
Making as composition from elements	119	(7)
Epilogue	126	(4)
Notes	130	(26)
Bibliography	156	(5)
Index	161