Overview

Offers a new understanding of representational cognition that synthesizes postwar philosophical approaches to the question of objective knowledge This study develops a novel account of representational cognition, explaining how cognitive systems progressively come to map the structure of their worlds. Daniel Sacilotto offers a constructive response to the critique of representation formulated throughout the post‑Kantian philosophical tradition. Rather than a skepticism or idealism whereby thinking can grasp appearances but never the real, representation, Sacilotto shows, is a constitutive dimension of cognitive systems’ creative capacity to know and intervene in the world of which they are part. Structure and Thought: Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition integrates various lines in contemporary philosophy, including those often seen as incommensurable or in irresolvable tension with one another. Sacilotto thus advances a productive synthesis of a materialist ambition to provide a creative and historical understanding of cognition with a structural realist account of representation. He shows how the different forms of sensory, discursive, and theoretical mediation that characterize human cognition are conducive to a realist epistemological framework that explains how the possibility of knowledge about a mind‑independent reality is conceivable.

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9780810146631

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I know of no other work with the sheer scope of this one. The range of ideas on display, and their synthesis into one narrative, is astonishing, sometimes even dizzying. --Danielle Macbeth, author of Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing

Author Information

Daniel Sacilotto is a professor of critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. Ray Brassier is a professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut.

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