Abstract

LOYOLA-CORTES, Rudyard Mauricio. The Last Nail in the Coffin of Cartesianism: Heidegger’s das Man and the Notion of Background in Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus. Tópicos (México) [online]. 2024, n.69, pp.285-322.  Epub Aug 16, 2024. ISSN 0188-6649.  https://doi.org/10.21555/top.v690.2609.

In this paper, I inquire into the notion of background in the philosophy of Charles Taylor and seek to complement it with reflections made by Hubert Dreyfus. This notion aims to counteract the cognitive representationalism that Descartes’s thought tremendously promoted and that has been largely perpetuated by modern epistemology. Representationalism, for Taylor, makes us open to anthropologies based on ontologies of disengagement (dualism and mechanistic monism), an imprint which decisively influenced modern and contemporary philosophy despite the efforts of different schools of thought that claim to have overcome it. For Dreyfus, the notion of background is linked to our social practices, and Heidegger’s controversial “the One” (das Man) is its privileged place of transmission; it is also that which would definitively collapse the Cartesian representationalist legacy.

Keywords : background; the One (das Man); world; epistemology; background practices; Taylor; Dreyfus; Heidegger.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )