Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

secondly, there comes a point where theory gives way to practice. It’s here that people tend to prove themselves more capable of reaching a consensus. Some things just need to be done — one way or another, they have to get sorted. So we have pragmatism. We even have instrumentalism in science, where we know by results that something works, even although we don’t really understand exactly how it works. Justice too takes up a pragmatic stance, once the limits of theories around ethics and morality have been reached.

I’ve tried, in this book, to give a fair hearing to all the types of truth-seeking with which we are engaged and all types of ethics and morality derived from these. Whilst contesting these is difficult on a person-to-person level, a book can speculate a little on possible answers, beyond what a careful balancing of the facts might allow. So I end now with a little speculation, and I hope you will take what follows as just that — pure speculation.

So what are the things that are purely speculative?

The phenomenological view of the world gives us the clearest picture. What we know is really only what we embody. When we ‘map’ the world — which, essentially, is the project of all other types of truth-seeking — we are really just creating an abstract realm beyond our own phenomenological world-view. This is often a very useful abstraction, but it is not reality.

So a key factor in our understanding of the world is through embodiment rather than

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