Search results for ""Author Robert E. Wood""

Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker’s philosophy. In Professor Robert Wood’s study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey’s terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is the dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural , and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions. Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, Placing Aesthetics aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions.

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Being Human is the fruit of many years teaching Philosophical Anthropology, conducting Phenomenological Workshops, and reading classic texts in the light of a reflective awareness of the field of experience. Being Human is intended to look to what is typically assumed but not examined in much of current philosophical literature.Today what typically appear as philosophical are textual studies that draw upon wide-ranging scholarship to learn how past thinkers used to think; or works that tend either to be "high-flying," operating at levels of abstraction far removed from experience and written in arcane style, and thus, for both reasons, difficult to assess (much of Continental thought); or minutely focused upon particular claims and the arguments that can be advanced for and against them (Analytical thought); or deconstructing texts to show how they do not fully work (the followers of Jacques Derrida). Scholarly study, abstract constructions, refined arguments, and deconstructive strategies are each important in their own way; but all take place within the structure of the field of experience which is typically assumed without paying explicit attention to it. Especially in philosophy of mind, the overall field of experience has too often been ignored, usually in favor of some conjecture as to how our ordinary categories would have to be changed when neuro-physiology will be far enough advanced to explain all our behavior.Robert E. Wood claims that it is best to understand what it is that is supposed to be explained before conjecturing about possible explanations. But when you do that, you will have to come to terms with what it means to seek explanation, what a Who is that seeks it, and why it is sought.

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Robert Wood's aim in Being and Cosmos is to reestablish a speculative view of the cosmos that goes back to the ancient Greeks and that corresponds to the holism of contemporary physics. There are two sets of problems in contemporary thought that militate against any such attempt. Most widespread is scientific reductionism in biology and neuroscience that explains awareness in terms of the mechanisms that underlie it. The second is the widespread attack in philosophy itself on speculative holism by deconstruction and anti-foundationalism. In Being and Cosmos, the tack against both is to make explicit the character of the mind that sees and thinks, that actively takes up commitment to the truth available in the disciplines involved. The basic ground of this position rests upon the functioning of the notion of Being that opens up the question of the character of the Whole and the human being's place in it. Thus position the treatment of the notion of Being as foundation and as orientation toward the Whole between the attack on reductionism and on deconstruction and anti-foundationalism. Wood concludes with a multidimensional sketch of an evolutionary view of the cosmos whose initial phases contain the potentialities for life, sensibility, and intellect as cosmic telos. The holism of contemporary physics has to be reconfigured in terms of this observation. Both reductionists and dualists should know that matter itself has to be re-minded and that mind itself matters.

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How do we understand the notions of the beautiful, the true, and the good, and how do they help us to know, to understand? Philosopher Robert E. Wood considers appeal respectively to the heart, to the intellect, and to the will. In our minds, their interplay beckons each of us to assimilate one’s past, and look forward towards further endeavours. They also set up what Wood calls a ""dialogical imperative"" to speak from where we stand and to stand in place of the Other, the person facing us, as well. The order follows Plato's claim that the love of Beauty is the light of the Good that grounds our pursuit of the True.Human experience, according to Wood, has a ""magnetically bipolar"" character, rooted in organically based desires. Yet that experience is aimed, through the all-encompassing notion of Being, at the absolute totality of what is. The notion of Being affords a distance that grounds both understanding and choice. Culture enters in as well. Its developments, initially empty in relation to the totality, come to occupy the space of meaning between the here-and-now and the totality. Each human being's genetic endowments interplay with one's cultural shaping. Taking them up, each individual sets up a unique field of attractions and repulsions belonging to the heart as one’s radically individual center.Wood proceeds from this phenomenological basis to consider key thinkers from Heraclitus and Parmenides, to Heidegger, Buber, and Marcel. He seeks, in this collection of essays from the past forty years, to develop a ""fusion of horizons"" with them, as part of an on-going broader philosophical dialogue that constitutes the history of thought, now and to come.

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As an introduction to his own notoriously complex and challenging philosophy, Hegel recommended the sections on phenomenology and psychology from The Philosophy of Spirit, the third part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophic Sciences. These offered the best introduction to his philosophic system, whose main parts are Logic, Nature, and Sprit. Hegel's Introduction to the System finally makes it possible for the modern reader to approach the philosopher's work as he himself suggested. The book includes a fresh translation of "Phenomenology" and "Psychology," an extensive section-by-section commentary, and a sketch of the system to which this work is an introduction. The book provides a lucid and elegant analysis that will be of use to both new and seasoned readers of Hegel.

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