Intersubjectivity and the "Space of Reasons": Fichte in the Post-Analytical Context (original) (raw)
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A precursor to the hard problem of consciousness confronts nihilism. Like physicalism, nihilism collides with the first-personal fact of what perception and action are like. Unless this problem is solved, nature’s inclusion of conscious experience will remain, as Chalmers warns the physicalist, an “unanswered question” and, as Jacobi chides the nihilist, “completely inexplicable". One advantage of Kant’s Copernican turn is to dismiss the question that imposes this hard problem. We need not ask how nature is accompanied by the first-person standpoint because “I think” is an apperceptive form of thinking that must be able to accompany any cognition of nature. Kant’s formal conception of apperception worries Fichte in his Nova Methodo lectures. This conception arguably cannot exhaust the ground of experience, for it does not show why we posit objects “at all". For Fichte, it is our agency that first opens a world of objects, viz., as subjects, means, ends, and obstacles. In what follows, I argue that, for Fichte, the I poses no hard problem because it collides exclusively with nihilistic views like Spinozism, which are refuted by a properly transcendental idealist conception of apperception, according to which the first-person standpoint is the absolute ground of our experience of nature. If transcendental idealism refutes nihilism, nature is no more explicable than that there is something it is like for me to perceive and act. In Section 1, I show why Kantian apperception is necessary for possible experience. In Section 2, I reconstruct Fichte’s argument that a modified conception of apperception refutes guises of nihilism, thereby solving the hard problem of consciousness. In Section 3, I suggest that transcendental idealism undermines Chalmers’ proposed solution to and Dennett’s dismissal of this problem.
Transcendental Idealism and the A Posteriori Contents of Experience
This paper deals with the question of whether Kant's transcendental idealism allows for an explanation of the a posteriori aspects of mental content by the properties of empirical objects. I first show that a phenomenalist interpretation has severe problems with assuming that we perceive an object as being red or as being cubical partly because the perceived object is red and cubical, and then present an interpretation that allows us to save the realistic intuition behind these claims. According to this interpretation, Kantian phenomenal properties are understood as response-dependent properties of extra-mental objects that also have to have some response-independent (in-itself-) properties. I show that this interpretation is well supported by Kant's remarks about the transcendental object in the A-edition of the first Critique and that it also makes intelligible why Kant took explanations of mental content by means of empirical properties to imply an explanation by means of nouminal properties without thereby violating his own doctrine of noumenal ignorance. This allows us to discern the true kernel in Adickes' infamous talk about Kant's theory of double affection.
Thought and Experience: Robust Conceptions of Phenomenology (Please only cite published version)
Revista Eletrônica Estudos Hegelianos, 2016
In this paper, I argue that Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theory of experience aims at defending a thick (or robust) account of experience: whilst both Kant and Hegel oppose the Myth of the Given and a non-conceptualist understanding of the content of experience, Hegel’s disagreement with Kant is centred on the fact that Kant only provides this conceptualist account of experience on the basis of transcendental (and hence subjective) idealism. The paper begins with a discussion of Hegel’s charge that Kant has a ‘thin’ conception of experience, and what this means. I then move on to discuss a Kantian rebuttal of Hegel’s criticisms, one which I ultimately conclude does not adequately overturn the Hegelian critique. Having discussed the interpretive dimensions of Hegel’s charge of ‘thinness’, the paper turns to the Hegelian critique in relation to the contemporary debate between conceptualists and non-conceptualists in analytic philosophy of mind in an effort to explicate its enduring philosophical importance and relevance. I argue that one can interpret Hegel’s critique of Kant as a proto-McDowellian critique of modern philosophy. For, like John McDowell, Hegel is concerned with providing a robust conception of phenomenology, one which sees both our environment and our experience of our environment as conceptually articulated in and of itself.
The Open I: A Study of Objects and Subjects
DPhil in Philosophy Thesis, 2022
This essay brings together insights from Edmund Husserl in the phenomenological tradition and from Elizabeth Anscombe in the ‘ordinary language’ philosophical tradition, to resolve a puzzle of how it is that we can think of non-existents. This involves distinguishing two senses of ‘to think of—’, and arguing that each has a distinctive sort of object. Their distinction is conceptually related to our capacity to be fallible or infallible about things, and our status as subjects of thought, irreducible to any physical object, but not equivalent to a special non-physical substance. To be a subject of thought is to be presented in mind with things about which one’s infallible. But the subject as such is not a ‘thing’. It is that which is individuated by which objects are presented infallibly to it, rather than by a substance with whom these or other objects come into material contact. An entity that doesn’t exist is not simply ‘nothing’. It has features determined either by what someone would say infallibly, granting honesty and correct use of terms, in answer to, “What are you thinking of?”, or by reference to a text, like a fictional story. Both routes are a matter of sentences determining what it is correct or incorrect to say in answer to, “What is it?” questions, which therefore determine what descriptions of the thing (e.g. as a tree or something else) are true or false. Existent things are those entities facts about which are determined by what would be perceptually experienced infallibly given a certain position in the physical environment. This implies, I argue, that the world in the broadest sense (to include both what is real and unreal) is inherently capable of being thought of. What is objectively the case isn’t hidden from us, but given only through subjective experience. So there is nothing that is ‘beyond’ experience, even if many things exist about which we’ve not yet thought or which we cannot, given our perceptual apparatus, personally experience except as the objects of other beings’ experience. This is consistent with Husserl’s version of transcendental idealism. The means by which I come to the conclusions I do involves a close reading of Anscombe’s paper, “The Intentionality of Sensation”. This involves distinguishing objects of thought that are things (real or unreal) from objects of thought that aren’t ‘things’ in really any sense at all. I call these simply ‘individuals as such’. They can only be individuated by reference to special types of question in which they count as ‘given’ by one’s describing not them directly but things and objects which non-identical with one another and non-equivalent to the individual they ‘are’. This idea of individuals through questions is brought together with Husserl’s methodological strategy of drawing ‘brackets’ round a certain attitude to the world, in order to reflect on the conditions of possibility for our taking such an attitude and having objective knowledge by way of it at all. That strategy and the notion of a ‘pure’ individual, together indicate a way of thinking about thoughts, thinkers and what is thought of that puts immersion into shared practices with language, particularly with questions, at the heart of philosophical method.
The Inner Life of Objects: Immanent Realism and Speculative Philosophy
2011
Often a division of concepts can help us better understand unknown or seldom charted philosophical terrain: historically, the distinctions and differences between idealism and materialism have proven helpful, but with Quentin Meillassoux‟s concept of correlationism, the divisions between realism and antirealism which once seemed clean-cut are now harder to understand. Graham Harman has gone a step further than Meillassoux‟s initial definition of correlationism, by which “we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other,” 2 claiming in lectures that those who have pledged fidelity to the realism banner after Meillassoux aren‟t realist enough. Instead, says Harman, we should demand that any philosophy which claims to be realist must grant that no entity is more real than any other, whether they be atoms, quarks, institutions, regimes, human beings, bonobos, dreams or dis...
Abstract This paper tries to meet the three basic constraints in the metaphysics of perception—that, following Schellenberg (Philos Stud 149:19–48, 2010), I call here the particularity constraint, the indistinguishable constraint, and the phenomeno- logical constraint—by putting forward a new combination of the two well-known contradictory views in this field: the relational view and the content view. Following other compatibilists (such as Schellenberg in Philos Stud 149:19–48, 2010), I do think that it is possible to reconcile the two views, recognizing that experience has both a relational and a representational dimension. However, in opposition to the current ways of combining these two views, I reject the idea of gappy contents. Instead, my proposal is builds on Lewis’s famous semantic (Philosophy and grammar, Riedel, Dordrecht, 1980b), according to which the content of sentences is best modeled as complex functions from context-index pairs to truth-values. In conformity with the content view, I want to suggest that perceptual experiences do represent complex properties or complex functions (e.g., being a yellow-cube- straight-ahead) that are either veridical or falsidical of particulars in contexts and indexes. In this relativist framework, I can also accommodate the relational claim that our experience of particulars must be understood as a fundamental cognitive relation rather than as a representation. In this way, particulars also play a key role in individuating perceptual experiences. Two token experiences, e and e0, are dif- ferent when one of the following conditions is met: first, if two different particulars, a and a0, are causally responsible for the token experiences e and e0, respectively, regardless of the time and location in which the perceptual experiences take place; second, if the same particular a, which is causally responsible for both e and e0, is either located in a different place or is in the same location but at a different time.
On Life Beneath the Subject/Object Duality
2016
Pierre Steiner (hereafter PS) asks us a precise question in his reply to our article ‘The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence’(Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009). He wonders whether we might endorse a pragmatist conception of experience that avoids char-acterizing it as ‘subjective ’ in opposition to an ‘objective ’ domain. Our answer is threefold: 1. We strongly sympathize with the non-dualist view of experience that is carefully developed and advocated in PS’s paper. For us as for PS, ‘lived experience is neither subjective nor objective but merely in situ’. The motivations of this approval can be seen in our previous writings. To begin with, the epistemological position of one of us (named ‘transcendental pragmatism’) implies a systematic inquiry into how the various aspects of subject/object duality are elaborated by way of stabilization of certain norms of research practice, rather than pre-existent (Bitbol et al., 2009). Even more importantly, the work...