Summary
In the following pages, and hopefully as a contribution to the philosophy ofperson, I shall try to: (1) explore the notions of object and subject, and show briefly how these have been presupposed by, and have been articulated through, certain theories ofperson; (2) suggest an argument for the overlap of object and subject as the ground for a discussion of feeling and experiencing; (3) offer a neologism,coject, and its derivatives,cojective andcojectivity, as a new and fertile ground for the reconstruction of the present social sciences as human sciences. These steps are taken in the main attempt to lay a further basis for the exploration, investigation, description, and analysis ofperson through the methods of the human sciences.
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Literatur
Gilbert Ryle,The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), pp. 11–12.
P. F. Strawson,Individuals (London: Methuen and Company, 1959), pp. 87–116.
Cf. Robin G. Collingwood (An Essay on Philosophical Method, Oxford: The Clarendon Press), 1933, especially pp. 54–91.
Robin G. Collingwood (The New Leviathan, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 35.
Collingwood,Op. cit., pp. 18–26, 35.
John Dewey (Art As Experience, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958), p. 56.
This “I feel” is paradigmatic to all of the human sciences, yet there is presently no “legitimate” science which considers it such. There could be, however, and this essay argues that there must be; indeed,there once was such a science, as Collingwood argues: “The sixteenth-century proposal for a new science to be called psychology did not arise from any dissatisfaction with logic and ethics as sciences of thought. It arose from the recognition (characteristic of the sixteenth century) that what we call feeling is not a kind of thinking, not a self-critical activity, and therefore not the possible subject-matter of criteriological science. Greek and medieval thinkers had generally taken it for granted that feeling is a cognitive activity; that when we feel cold or see a red colour or hear a chrill sound we are coming to know in the various ways corresponding to the various natures of the object known that there is something cold or red or shrill in the world about us. In the sixteenth century it was for the first time both clearly and generally recognized that this was not the case: that in feeling a coldness or seeing a redness or hearing a shrillness we were not recognizing an object but simply having a feeling, due no doubt to things in our environment but not itself constituting knowledge of these things. The proof of this was that the activity of feeling or sensation contained no element of self-criticism. The business of thinking includes the discovery and correction of its own errors. That is no part of the business of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and experiencing the emotions associated with them. These activities were thus not activities of the ‘mind’, if that word refers to the self-critical activities called thinking. But neither were they activities of the ‘body’. To use a Greek word (for the Greeks had already made important contributions to this science of feeling) they were activities of the ‘psyche’, and no better word could have been devised for the study of them than psychology.Thus psychology was put on the map of the sciences, to march on the one hand with physiology and on the other with logic and ethics; a science of feeling, designed to fill a gap between the existing science of bodily function and the existing sciences of mind, in no way competing with any of them.” (An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1940, pp. 109–110). [Italics mine].
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Stanage, S.M. Cojectivity and the human sciences. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 4, 81–97 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01801066
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01801066