Curing Dualistic, Disembodied Patterns of Thinking in the Academy

This essay develops aspects and implications of Poteat’s critique of the Enlightenment’s critical paradigm and development of post-critical thinking in dialogue with Pascal in his dissertation and four post-critical thinkers who figured prominently in his project: Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Polanyi. Then it critiques from a Poteatian perspective the critical, dualistic, discarnate picture that still dominates the academy, especially attending to the cognitive science of religion. CSR involves both a reductive physicalism involving unconscious mental mechanisms and a re-inscribing of subjectivistic or mentalist (alleged) beliefs in disembodied supernatural and human spirits.