Truth in the Making: Knowledge and Creation in Modern Philosophy and Theology
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...
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Truth in the Making represents a sophisticated effort to map the complex relations between human knowledge and creative power, as reflected across more than half a millennium of philosophical enquiry. Showing the intimacy of this problematic to the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Vico and David Lachterman, the book reveals how questions about creation apparently diluted by secularism in fact retain much of their potency today. If science could counterfeit or synthesize nature precisely from its smallest nuts and bolts, as Descartes and Hobbes implied and as modern science increasingly suggests, would it create an identical world to that we live in now Robert C. Miner offers a precise genealogy of modern thought on truth and creation: from medieval theology's identification of human creativity with divine initiative to the radical Leibnizian contention that human ideas are 'not little copies of God's', and may at once exceed mimesis and produce things new, unpredictable and unseen. He considers how the theological importance given to creation interacts historically with the secularisation and instrumentalisation of modes of discovery and method, and asks how knowledge is understood between different disciplines, from the allegorical discipline of poetry to the constructible field of mathematics. The book is an eloquent reminder of the ways in which theology continues to fling a wild card at philosophical understandings of reality, countering theories of metaphysical equivalence of the 'real' and 'artificial' with theologies in which human making is always fallible, and strives only for approximate participation in divine truth. As a strenuous and informative breakdown of leading theories of knowledge, Truth in the Making shows the continuing influence of theological questions upon philosophical, scientific and aesthetic disciplines, whilst raising topical questions about the ultimate nature of our reality and our freedom to modify and define it.
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
