Seminar: Maritain’s Hope for an “Existential Epistemology” [Fall 2024]

“besides… communicable knowledge, which takes place through ideas, there is another knowledge whose objects it eh concrete as such and which arises from experience: this is incommunicable knowledge. In acquiring it we can, no doubt, have masters and guides; but in this case they do not impart to us the objects of knowledge themselves. What they do transmit is a store of cognitions, counsels and rules which we need in order to have a certain experience, in itself, inexpressible, as is every experience.”

So writes Jacques Maritain in his Degrees of Knowledge. This work—a text rife with profound insights into not only knowledge but the very existence of the human person—Maritain proposed to articulate an account of knowledge, a noetics, or an “epistemology” that would comprise meaningfully the incommunicable experience of the human person.

In this seminar, Dr. Matthew Minerd will lead students in a close reading of both Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge and some essays written on the same topic, in pursuit of understanding and bringing into some articulation this existential epistemology.