Epistemological Intimacy and the Hermeneutics of Transaction: some notes for an attempt at a deconstruction of current philosophical discourse

This article offers some notes toward a theory of the putative transactional nature of modern human relationships, especially as these relate to the academic and intellectual world. I consider first the nature of ontological and conceptual theses in order to situate my own within this broad division. I then take up the concept of metanarratives and the nature of human immersion within a given conceptual scheme. This leads to the suggestion that there is a transactional or commodity-driven paradigm operating at the level of human mental exchange. It is proposed that this reduction of human relations to the transactional is tied, at least in part, to the dominance of deductive reasoning and the a-historical approach to philosophical reflection and cultural analysis. The third, and now somewhat ignored mode of reasoning in Aristotle’s logical canon, dialectic, will be explored as a possible alternative to the dominant, winner-takes-all, deductive mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning, it will be shown, is more suited to a communitarian approach to the pursuit of truth, which, in turn, may serve as an antidote to the dominance of the transactional in current human affairs.