Cognition: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Western Truth and Reality

Introduction

(Hegel, 1896)

Positionality, knowledge, and truth are all independently and ultimately determined by the situated nature of their reality. Nowhere is this of greater significance than in the establishment of what that reality is and is one which developing researchers often find challenging to clearly articulate and operationally define.

Historical Faith Perspectives

It is at an ontological rather than an epistemological level, though, that truth is of greatest significance in terms of its perception. It is useful, firstly, to contextualise and frame perspectives in faith and religiosity during the course of any academic consideration of truth and reality, since belief plays such a fundamental role in both. Medievalists advocated that the concept of truth transcended everything. Today we speak of the situated nature of knowledge, context specificity and temporality are fundamental to our understanding of ‘what is’- however this originated from the notion that as transcendentalists, truth is convertible ‘with being’ (Tallant, 2017: pp 45-46). The Renaissance granted religion and philosophy limited credence, but its trajectory from Italy across Europe, ensured its evident impact across a diverse array of disciplines, including science, art and perhaps most importantly the notion of human thought and consciousness, which is still apparent today. The pragmatism it proceeded with ensured its relevance to the improvement of human existence and the capacity of scholarship to shape and orchestrate human endeavour outside of the scope of historical and religiously based superstition. This humanistic perspective engaged a paradigm shift that had held Europe to intellectual ransom for centuries. Because of this, the overall aim of an education was aligned with the vision of all man could actually be, incorporating the aesthetic as well as cognate disciplines and reconciled concepts of humanist scholarship. This impacted widely on the positionality of the church, whose symbolic practices and rituals stemmed back to the first origins of Christian worship. In fundamentally casting aside ritualistic practice that underpinned the original universal Catholic faith, the path for the Reformation was laid and the potential for change set across European communities of scholarship. Because of this, accessibility to literature changed - the more people read, the more educated they became and unsurprisingly the more the conceptual basis of humanism was perpetuated. As an integral part of this education, there was a raft of new and innovative approaches in creative practice, which uniquely contributed to the development of novel, tacit and aesthetic knowledge, particularly in relation to music, painting, and sculptural techniques.

The sciences were also impacted heavily upon by this systemic change in European intellectual infrastructure, and the Renaissance contributed irrevocably to the prevailing approach to science that actively encouraged rationality and an evidenced based approach to belief. Indeed, it was these changes that contributed to the progression of human civilisation and remains reflected in the societies we occupy as humanity of the 21^st Century.