A short epistemological narrative of logos, telos and aesthetic reason
This article discusses the potential of a contemporary understanding of what Heraclitus and the Stoics called ‘cosmological logos’, and its relation to human reason and cultural communication. I will relate the example of Descartes’ and his introspective method in
Meditations on the First Philosophy (1647) to a contemporary understanding of the potential of introspection, related to theories of the embodied mind, virtual levels of nature and a possible connection between them. Where Descartes focused upon the rational properties of the logical mind,
and its potential to relate to nature’s higher logic, I relate my vision of a modern logos philosopher to Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of nature’s ‘habits’, triad semiosis and the overall phaneroscopic phenomenology, which I connect to the concept of ‘aesthetic
reason’. Aesthetic reason, in this context, represents a complex kind of rationality that involves a broader variety of cognitive processes. It is based on Extended Sentience, which includes properties of quantum communication that simultaneously work within the confinements of the mind–body,
while simultaneously transgressing it. This article takes an overall evolutionary perspective, and claims that the prerequisites for experience and rationality are changing over historical time, due to evolutionary changes at endosemiotic levels of the mind–body. The prerequisites for
Descartes’ activity of cognitive mediation and such of a modern logos philosopher, would thus not be equal. I will elaborate on the differences in this article.
Keywords: Descartes; Extended Sentience; aesthetics; cognition; logos; nature; ratio; semiotics
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: University of Plymouth
Publication date: 17 May 2012
- Technoetic Arts focuses upon the juncture between art, technology and the mind. Divisions between academic areas of study, once rigidly fixed, are gradually dissolving due to developments in science and cultural practice. This fusion has had a dramatic effect upon the scope of various disciplines. In particular, the profile of art has radically evolved in our present technological culture
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Intellect Books page
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content