[2/12/12 8:53:32 AM] Dr Alexandra Hart: New Forms for Old Problems

"Rationalistic", "Cartesin", "objectivist": these are some terms used to characterize the dominant tradition of recent times. Yet when we reexamine our understanding of knowledge and cognition, I find that the best expression to use for our tradition is abstract: nothing characterizes better the units of knowledge that have been deemed most "natural". It is this tendency to find our way toward the rarefied atmostphere of the general and the formal, the logical and the well defined, the represented and the foreseen, which characterizes our Western world.

Dr Alexandra Hart: However, there are strong indications that within the loose federation of sciences dealing with knowledge and cognition - the cognitive sciences - the conviction is slowly growing that this picture is upside down and that a radical paradigm shift is imminent.  At the very center of this emerging view is the conviction that the proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete, embodied, incorporated, lived; that knowledge is about situatedness; and that the uniqueness of knowledge, its historicity and context, is not a "noise"  concealing an abstract configuration in its true essence. The concrete is not a step toward something else: it is both where we are and how we get to where we will be.

Quote from "The First Lecture: Know-How and Know-What", in "Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition, by Fransisco Varela, pp.8-9