Stratified Reality
| BIBLICAL | PASCAL | BHASKAR |
| Spirit | Charity | Spiritual |
| Soul | Mind | Rational |
| Body |
Body | Empirical |
Roy Bhaskar has proposed the idea of STRATIFIED REALITY or LEVELS OF DISCOURSE when talking about epistemology.
Instead of being bound by the strictures of a scientific, rationalist worldview, we can see reality as being knowable at different levels as Bhaskar suggests.
According to this model each stratum of reality has its own distinctive methods of verification.
- EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION & TESTING in the Natural Sciences
- REASONING & LOGIC at the Rational, Mathematical or Metaphysical level
- SPIRITUAL REVELATION, as Paul describes in 1 CORINTHIANS 2:10-14, which he says cannot be understood by the 'soulish' person because spiritual truths are spiritually discerned, not by the rational mind.
Pascal's 'Orders of Knowing'
Bhaskar’s three levels of stratified reality are reminiscent of Pascal's THREE ORDERS OF KNOWING (Blaise Pascal Pensees, fragments 298 and 308):
BODY, MIND, and CHARITY (what we would call Spirit).
These represent the levels of EMPIRICAL RESEARCH, REASON and FAITH based on spiritual revelation.
(For more detail, go to Joe Esla THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF PASCAL'S WAGER
Source: https://www.thirdmill.org/newfiles/joe_esala/pt.joe_esala.wager.html )
The Tripartite Model of Human Personality & Stratified Reality
The relevance of this approach in relation to the classic Biblical tripartite model of human personality in terms of BODY, SOUL and SPIRIT can be summarised in the diagram above ..
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