Philosophy
While there is plenty to criticize in the work of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, one cannot justifiably claim that Jose Vasconcelos criticisms of traditional Western views on the nature of knowledge apply to these theorists if only because Vasconcelos' criticisms do not really apply to anything, as his criticisms are largely based on straw men. This is not to say that traditional Western views on the nature of knowledge should be free from criticism, but rather that the problems with these traditional views are more fundamental than Vasconcelos realizes, to the point that Vasconcelos suffers from many of these same issues. Essentially, both Vasconcelos and the previously mentioned authors suffer from a simply ignorance regarding the functioning of the human brain, the nature of consciousness and memory, and the evolutionary processes by which organisms and ideas evolve, with this ignorance born out of an implicit or explicit maintenance of religiously constrained thinking.
While it would of course be enjoyable to engage in a robust "trolling" of these philosophers, rather than attempt to detail all of the various ways in which these author's ignorance reveals itself in their texts, it will instead be more useful to propose how one not confined by these limitations is able to describe knowledge and the way in which it is obtained. Put simply, the creation and consideration of all knowledge is essentially biological. While the humanities in general and philosophy in particular have continuously striven to erect a wall between the "hard" sciences regarding physical laws and processes and the humanities' more ephemeral cultural considerations, this distinction is largely arbitrary and only serves to further ghettoize philosophy, thus precluding it from producing politically effective work (due to the fact that any human production in the modern world cannot be produced in isolation, and thus is essentially political, serving either to reinforce the dominant power structures or challenge them). All thought, and thus knowledge, is the product of the human body, both in terms of the sensory information gathered and the synthesis of that information.
Recognizing this does away with a number of previous "problems" in Western philosophy far more elegantly than any of Vasconcelos' criticisms, because questions of empiricism vs. rationalism or the mind vs. The body disintegrate in the face of the realization that the biological basis of consciousness and thought is all that anyone has to go on. While one is entirely free to question the reality of physical existence or propose some other plane of reality or consciousness, there is no evidence in support of this skepticism or arbitrary divisions, such that any philosophers attempting to say something useful or intelligible must always return to biological foundations, because anything else is merely an exercise in magical realism, like a debate over the proper taxonomical category of imaginary animals.
Thus, the potential for consciousness, thought, and knowledge is entirely contained within the human body, so while one may reasonably argue that these phenomena are examples of an emergent complexity born out of a relatively simple arrangement of and interaction between constituent parts, to suggest that consciousness, thought, or knowledge are somehow existent or meaningful outside of the human body is as laughable as suggesting that the meaning gained from reading this sentence is somehow distinct and extricable from the sentence itself and the experience of reading it.
Furthermore, recognizing that human knowledge is inherently and inextricably tied to the evolution of human biology does away with any of the assumed differences between modes of thinking based on regional or cultural distinction. While there are undoubtedly differences in Eastern and Western philosophy, these differences do not represent fundamentally different modes of thinking, but rather different flavors of human thought, as all human thought is continuously and forever bound together by its shared biological underpinnings. In this way, one may begin to consider the similarity between different modes of thought, rather than abandon useful investigation in the face of seemingly impenetrable differences.
It is worth pointing out that this is not merely a dodge; proposing the dominance of biology and evolution over thought and knowledge is not a means of obviating the need to consider different modes of knowing, but rather offers a useful starting point for this consideration, because if one begins with the faulty assumption that there are somehow fundamentally different modes and methods of knowing depending on one's cultural background, then there is ultimately no point in continuing on with any discussion or analysis,...
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