Truth In The Making
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Is knowing a purely passive reception of something concrete outside the mind, or when we know something, are we creating something too?Spanning more than 500 years of philosophical enquiry from the Middle Ages to the present day, Robert Miner clarifies modern philosophical conceptions of knowing as making or constructing, and contrasts this view with the theological understanding of knowing as a participation in divine creation.This study demonstrates how 'creative knowledge' has its roots in the theologies of Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas Cusanus. It explores the multiple ways in which this idea influenced the architects of modern philosophy, most notably Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, despite their secular stance. Miner contends that, well in advance of Kant, one of these thinkers, Gaimbattista Vico provided a remarkably succinct formulation of the metaphysical and epistemological core of modernity in his principle verum et factum convertuntur: 'the true and the made are convertible'.In Truth in the Making, Robert Miner challenges the standard assumption that Kant was the first thinker to conceive of knowing as constructive activity, and shows how contemporary theology can reclaim a concept of knowing that is both creative and participant in divine wisdom.
AcknowledgmentsPrologue1Thomas Aquinas1Scientia Dei and creation2Creation and human production7Making and the "analogy of being"112Nicolaus Cusanus19The dramatic setting of the Idiota de Mente20Construction as manifestation of forms through image-making21Constructions of reason23The activity of mens: vis assimilativa and the construction of concepts26Activa creatio humanitatis: making as imaging of the divine exemplar313Francis Bacon40The Baconian factum40Induction as constructive method45Limits on human making: Bacon's forms50For and against Bacon554Rene Descartes60The Cartesian factum60Representations as artifacts made from simple natures65The constitution of simple natures67Construction in the determination of quaestiones69The division of the Cartesian inheritance735Thomas Hobbes78The making of geometrical definitions79The commonwealth as feat of technical making85Science and power926Giambattista Vico96Making and truth96Abstraction as creation100Making within metaphysics105Making as imaginative mythopoesis108Making as the creation of elements113Making as composition from elements119Epilogue126Notes130Bibliography156Index161
