Abstract

Our inquiry begins, as it must, with the robust, familiar world of everyday, for one can start only from the place where one in fact is. We are now in a room where there are men and women, tables and chairs, pens, pencils, and books, dust, light, wood, and metal. Those who, with Descartes and Hume, try to ignore or cancel out that world, not only seek to reject what they themselves presuppose, but deny themselves and others the right to make use of evidence, to verify what is being proposed, or to relate what is conceived to what is in fact believed and practiced. In a word, they sacrifice plausibility, achieving an abstract intellectual account at the price of a radical incoherence, an incapacity to relate mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice.