Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject German Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 9, Leiden University, course: Narrative, Voice and Fiction, language: English, abstract: Man in the Holocene is very much about a quest for or even the possibility to have a knowledge of the world. This is apparent in Geiser's efforts to fathom and order his surroundings by accumulating a wealth of knowledge represented by the considerable amount of secondary texts with which the main body of text is interlaced. Emphasis seems to be laid on man's finitude as a foundation of knowledge and the consequent self- constitutive power of the individual to produce knowledge. The mental deterioration of Geiser seems to further stress the finitude of man as a condition for knowledge. However, as Foucault poignantly makes clear, Man is a very recent invention and the individual is not self-constitutive of knowledge. Man thinks he is sovereign, all the while he is necessarily and inevitably bound by bodies of discourse that form the condition of his existence.

"The inquiry into the foundations of knowledge is a systematic inquiry into the problem of truth. This problem constitutes one of the three main concerns of philosophical analysis, the others being the problem of beauty and the problem of goodness." Thus Evangelos P. Papanoutsos, Greece's leading contemporary philosopher, introduces this third book of his "Trilogy of the Mind." The first two volumes covered aesthetics and ethics; this one is a major work in epistemology. Combining rigorous analysis with thorough-going scholarship, displaying an intimate acquaintance with the physical and humanistic sciences, and drawing on a deep understanding of philosophical method and the history of philosophy, Professor Papanoutsos is held in high esteem by his European colleagues. This translation of his masterpiece will enhance his reputation and influence among readers of English. The themes of The Foundation of Knowledge range over the topics that have been continually challenging to the modern era of philosophers: being and consciousness, experience and reason, common sense and science, and the domains of knowledge, including the nature of philosophical knowledge. Special attention is paid to the analysis of theoretical consciousness, the problems of categorical thinking, the theory of judgment, mathematics and logic, and the limits of historical understanding.

Contemporary epistemology has been moving away from classical foundationalism--the thesis that our empirical knowledge is grounded in perceptual beliefs we know with certainty. McGrew reexamines classical foundationalism and offers a compelling reconstruction and defense of empirical knowledge grounded in perceptual certainty. He articulates and defends a new version of foundationalism and demonstrates how it meets all the standard criticisms. The book offers substantial rebuttals of the arguments of Kuhn and Rorty and demonstrates the value of the classical analytic approach to philosophy. Foundations will interest philosophers of science, language, and the mind.

"This flexible, new series provides the only introductory material organized around such well-defined issues as: What conditions justify exceptions to moral principles? What are the possibilities of belief in God being rational? Each volume contains eight to ten selections averaging between fifteen and twenty pages, and an introduction which gives a clear statement of the problem, points out a variety of possibles approaches, and locates each reading in the structure the editor has erected. The readings are both classical and contemporary; and all directly relate to each other, one criticizing and advancing alternatives to the other. Ther series, therefore, includes a volume devoted to questions about justice and equality, several volumes on substantive moral issues rather than meta-ethical questions, and a volume that treats many different approaches to the evaluation of religious beliefs, contemporary as well as classical."-Publisher.

The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?