Patrick Bourgeois

The thesis of this paper, that the contemporary Catholic philosopher needs to be critical in an expanded Kantian sense of the boundary of reason, while still maintaining a strict biblical and Christian faith, is developed in four parts. First, the nature of a Catholic philosophical pluralistic community will be explored. In keeping with this pluralism, a first sense of boundary as that between philosophical reason and Christian faith will be considered. Then, a second sense of boundary as the Kantian context of critical philosophy in which reason sets the limit on the human claims to objective knowledge will be considered. A twofold expansion of this Kantian sense of the boundary-limit of reason is seen to be necessary. Finally, part four focuses on the place of Catholic faith for such a philosopher, suggests ways to overcome certain extremes, and proposes a possible path for thinking the Transcendent.

Mead's pragmatic focus on habit as the foundation of meaning is usually viewed in sharp contrast with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological examination of meaning within experience. This paper attempts to show the way in which the explicit focus of each philosopher's position is latent within that of the other. For Mead and Merleau-Ponty alike, the content of human awareness at all levels is inseparably linked with the structure of human behavior. And, for both, such a structure is permeated throughout by the ``living meaning'' of anticipatory habit or vital intentionality

The philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty may seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive. On further examination, however, they can be seen to share some fundamental points of view. For instance, they both share a common rejection of a modern mechanistic explanation of nature, and both endorse what we might call a pre-linguistic level of meaning. In this paper, we show that these thinkers not only share some fundamental philosophical views, but also had, for many years, contemplated what cognitive scientists today call “embodied cognition.”

Thompson attempts to overcome some of the impasses within the longstanding controversies over the methods of the social sciences. Within this controversy, there is a polarization around two positions: one argues that the methods of the social sciences are essentially identical with those of the natural sciences, while the other contends that, since there is a radical discontinuity between the natural and the social domains, natural scientific method is inadequate to grasp the social world of the social sciences.