Author Archives: Steven Yates

TLDR version: the pivotal philosopher René Descartes left a long legacy that misdirected most subsequent philosophy, from Locke and Hume down through Kant’s transcendental turn and after. We were saddled with epistemological problems that resisted solution on their own terms, hence the drift into collective subjectivism by some schools and the positivistic rejection of systematic philosophy altogether by others. Our purpose here is to examine what happens should we refuse to follow Descartes’s insistance on the cogito as the only suitable foundation for knowledge or view ourselves as “thinking things,” autonomous rational entities who are invariably isolated homunculi. Instead we look to our legacy as problem solvers and members of communities. The ideas of learning and knowledge as reliable interaction–reliabilism–tells us that we can trust our senses and our reason much of the time, unless a problem arises that tells us otherwise. Systems thinking, finally, illuminates how the world is put together, rather than leaving it an ultimately mysterious Ding-an-Sich, the Kantian legacy of the unsolved Cartesian interaction problem. Nor need we view ourselves as hopelessly atomized and tribalized. Continue reading →