Of a false dilemma and the knowledge of values
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Of a false dilemma and the knowledge of values Joseph Gamache1 Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The work of Gabriel Marcel is retrieved and set in relation to the question of moral epistemology. I begin by surveying Marcel’s long-running critique of a false dilemma with implications for the nature of our knowledge of values. According to this dilemma, a person’s knowledge of something is either objective, and therefore transcendent but impersonal, or it is subjective, and therefore personal but immanent, reaching only one’s inner states. Applied to the knowledge of values, this false dilemma leaves philosophy with a choice between accounts of value-knowledge as scientific/objective knowledge or value-knowledge as self-knowledge. Building on Marcel’s critique of this false dilemma, I suggest a program for a Marcelian moral epistemology that identifies the comportments by which human person are receptive to values and hence to knowledge of values. Two examples of such comportment are discussed in relation to the problem of value-knowledge: exigence and fidelity. Keywords Gabriel Marcel · Value · Moral epistemology · Intersubjectivity Of all philosophical errors, false dilemmas are especially pernicious. They are obstacles on the road of philosophical research. We find ourselves caring more about preserving the dilemma, than we do about discovering the truth. Instead of honestly reckoning with things as they are, we fall back on an explanation in terms of the dilemma, even when doing so fails to do justice to the thing in question. This paper takes as its starting point one such dilemma about the epistemological relationship between knower and known, a dilemma that leaves us with a choice between impersonal accounts of knowledge that secure transcendence and personalistic1 1 By “personalistic,” I do not mean to align Marcel with any particular personalistic thinker. Certainly, anybody well-read in both personalism and Marcel will note their similarities, even though Marcel never labeled himself as such and took issue with the word (2008, p. 127). Rather, I mean an account that makes the person an indispensable element of epistemology.
* Joseph Gamache [email protected] 1
Department of Theology and Philosophy, Marian University, Indianapolis, IN, USA
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accounts of knowledge that lose transcendence. Henceforth I refer to this as “the false dilemma.”2 The critique of the false dilemma is a recurring theme in the work of the twentieth-century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. In the first section of this paper, I discuss instances of the false dilemma and Marcel’s critique thereof. This provides a deeper understanding of the false dilemma. In discussing these instances, I focus attention on the applicability of the false dilemma to the knowledge of values.3 By following Marcel’s critique of the false dilemma, aspects of an account of valueknowledge to which the false dilemma is blind come into view. These elements— exigence and intersubjectivity—
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