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Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology

Online ISBN:
9780190861001
Print ISBN:
9780190860974
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology

Stephen R. Grimm (ed.)
Stephen R. Grimm
(ed.)
Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University
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Published online:
19 September 2019
Published in print:
31 October 2019
Online ISBN:
9780190861001
Print ISBN:
9780190860974
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.

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