Connections between J.L.Vives and C.S. Peirce are shown. Not only is reflec-tion on language and meaning central in both thinkers, but Peirce also knew Vives' thought especially through W. Hamilton and the Scottish common sense school. Peirce credited Vives with being a forerunner of the use of dia-grams in logic, and both share a critical view of late medieval nominalistic logicians and a social and hierarchical conception of knowledge.

Although the success of Habermas’s theory of communicative action depends on his dialogical model of understanding in which a theorist is supposed to participate in the debate with the actors as a ‘virtual participant’ and seek context-transcendent truth through the exchange of speech acts, current literature on the theory of communicative action rarely touches on the difficulties it entails. In the first part of this paper, I will examine Habermas’s argument that understanding other cultural practices requires the interpreter to virtually (...) participate in the “dialogue” with the actors as to the rationality of their cultural practice and discuss why, according to Habermas,such dialogue leads to the “context-transcendent truth”. In the second part, by using a concrete historical example, I will reconstruct a “virtual dialogue” between Habermas and Michael Polanyi as to the rationality of scientific practice and indicate why Habermas’s dialogical model of understanding based on the methodology of virtual participation cannot achieve what it professes to do. (shrink)

The difference between a scientific system and the non scientific system is only a matter of forms of rationality: so also the difference between empirical system and non empirical system explainable in terms of the kinds of rationality systems in their structures. Similarly, the classification of civilized cultures and primitive cultures or the black civilization and western civilization is all about forms of rationalizations. That is because the form of explanation of European Society is different from the form of explanation (...) of the Black African animistic society. However, structural functionalism is an attempt on a large scale to combine the methods of both functionalism and structuralism which is not only extant in African philosophy but also embedded in the practice of tradition. Indeed Theistic Panpsychic rationality is culturally structural and functional thereby qualifying to be described as structural functional Panpsychic communicative animism. (shrink)