ABSTRACT
Humanist philosophy has burdened us with the legacy of a schism between belief and criticism, which is difficult enough, but the institutional separation of disciplinary functions makes matters worse. Granted the distinction between the ‘belief disciplines’ and the ‘critical disciplines’, a difference that serves principally to reinforce mutual insularity, we find a parallel offensive front within the critical disciplines themselves. Science and reason then find themselves caught between ‘realist’ tendencies, to which they owe their experimental ethos and practical strength, and ‘idealist’ tendencies towards a general criticism of the ‘constructed’ status of knowledge, largely derived from postKantian phenomenology. The work considered below is explicitly an attempt to ‘negotiate a middle course between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition of a pregiven inner world (idealism)’ (Varela et al. 1993/2000: 172).
