If I may slightly reformulate Kant in line with Kane’s interpretation, he said that there are three questions a philosopher can ask:
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What can I know?
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How should I live?
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What should I aspire to?
In a pre-modern context (and this includes philosophers like MacIntyre) these questions aren’t really separable but instead should be understood as a single question that the human mind needs to break down into more manageable bites. But with the sunderings of modernity, the three questions have become different questions whereby one can be understood in terms of another, so for example rationalists try to understand the second question in terms of the first whereas idealists attempt to understand the second question in terms of the third. That, of course, isn’t as serious as post-modernity where the three questions are seen as completely unrelated (and possibly uninteresting) and the sundering is complete.
So I would ask you how you understand the relationship between those three questions with respect to your tradition and how you feel you should proceed from that understanding. I ask because I’ve been thinking about it a lot. A philosopher whom I admire (to the point where I view my disagreements with him as failings of my own philosophy as opposed to failings in his) has clearly been influenced by two relatively polarized philosophers, one rational and one idealist. I’ve decided that he is more in line with the idealistic tradition (something I already suspected) so I’m doing my best to try and understand how I ought live with respect to that. But it has gotten me thinking that the divide between many of the posters here could be the two forms of modernity. I say that because I don’t see too many post-modernists in the religion section (most of the questions apt to be discussed here don’t make sense in a post-modern context) and since pre-modernity has been all but killed even those who find a great deal of appeal in that system are still biased by their previous model of viewing the world.
I mean, for me as a scientists I feel I ought be more in line with the rationalist position. But my views on epistemology at the end of the day drive me away from that position somewhat – but more importantly, my own intuition drives me away from that position. “What can I know” related quite directly to the efficient cause, there is no argument there, but I do not think it can be related to the final cause nearly as easily if at all. And what is philosophy if not a discussion of final causes?
So, anyway, where do you stand and why?