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Any philosophical understanding of human thought and action faces two chief obstacles. On the one hand, there are tendencies toward certain global conceptions that ultimately hide everything: man is Economic Being; man is Sexual Being. The burden, or the hopeless task, of those who hold such conceptions is to show that one undeniable feature of man can be sufficiently differentiated to "account" for every feature of human history and experience. On the other, there are certain persistent features of philosophy itself, including enduring dogmas which tend to determine in advance our notion of the proper place of values. By the reference to thought in the title I would call attention to one of these—the traditional but all too simplistic bifurcation of thought and feeling that Scheler properly rejects. Surely, thought and action, cannot be separated. But whether the thought in question is the narrow, rationalistic thought that philosophers have often held it to be is precisely one of the issues here.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-6434-4_2

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