Abstract

After exhorting us to wake up from our ‘daydreaming’ and revolutionize our modality of thought to that of conceptualization, Descartes seems to forget about this crucial matter of a discontinuous leap. So, too, it seems has the profession generally and this has infected philosophical research and teaching. It is urged here that discontinuous processes are crucial in the universe, in human life, in human thinking. Such ontological events cannot be handled by dualism, materialism or postmodernism. Concentration on such discontinuous processes is urged, an alternative is briefly indicated, and a criterion for ordering levels of human levels of reality is offered. It follows in the line of Cantor and Marx. It is suggested that a human being is a transfinite entity and that such an entity has many levels of being, among which are cognitive processes, imaginative processes and physical processes. A person is ‘not other than’ these without being ‘nothing but’ any of these.