Understanding and Being Lecture 7:1

CD/mp3 149, first part of seventh Halifax lecture on Insight. Corresponds to CWL 5: 156-67. Sponsored by Daisaku Wada. The notion of being is compatible with a number of different philosophies. Is it simply an a priori category that is imposed upon data? The real issue is, How much of knowing is from the subject, and how much is from the object? If knowing is intuition, confrontation, looking, anything that comes from the subject is not knowing. If knowing is an ontological perfection of the subject, then the more knowing there is that comes from the subject the better off is the subject. The account involves a dependence of knowing on the subject. We know because it is natural to us. We are born ignorant. But we have by nature a potency to know. It is by acquisition that we move to knowing in act. In intellect the habits of science in general are all acquired, except for the habit of principles (contradiction, identity, etc.). As these principles regard being, being is naturally known. Intellect has by nature a determinate range: everything, being. To what extent is our intending being, conceiving being, knowing being absolutely independent of experience, and in this sense a priori? Actual wonder is not absolutely independent of experience. We wonder about something, an object supplied from experience.

Database and descriptions © Copyright 2017 by Robert M. Doran

 

Audio restoration by Greg Lauzon