Re: feeling&knowing

Deborah Ann Hicks (hicks who-is-at UDel.Edu)
Wed, 3 Dec 1997 10:15:45 -0500 (EST)

Jay, in your response to my query about emotions, you are really
exorcising those Cartesian demons! (Jay the Exorcist???)

You note the focus on Reason and rationality within Western traditions,
which priviledge (in the ways that postructuralists have emphasized) the
"top" or "first" member of pairs like Reason/Passion. However, in
some of the early Greek traditions that you cite as beginnings for such
priviledging (and therefore exclusion), rationality was not posed as
contradictory w/ the kind of intuitive and felt understanding that one
would attain in a kind of "relational" way -- that of "knowing with",
which would include moral perception and felt qualities. I guess the
argument that I was trying to make before was that it would be interesting
to imagine the result for contemporary educational & psychological
theorizing if such aspects of knowing were allowed to "interanimate"
our discourses about learning.

Deborah