This dissertation engages critically with the metaphysical implications of the
respective transcendentalisms of Husserl, Deleuze, and Kant in an attempt to disclose
their largely untapped resources for a renewed consideration of the ability of science
to grasp reality as it is in-itself. Chapter 1 examines the metaphysical implications of
Husserl’s critique of natural scientific objectivity in his later transcendental
philosophy in connection to his early formulations of phenomenological ob…
Read moreThis dissertation engages critically with the metaphysical implications of the
respective transcendentalisms of Husserl, Deleuze, and Kant in an attempt to disclose
their largely untapped resources for a renewed consideration of the ability of science
to grasp reality as it is in-itself. Chapter 1 examines the metaphysical implications of
Husserl’s critique of natural scientific objectivity in his later transcendental
philosophy in connection to his early formulations of phenomenological objectivity
around the axis of the distinction between metaphysics as the science of real Being
and formal ontology as the science of Being in the most universal sense. I argue that
Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics constitutes a framework in which the ideal
Being of the transcendental dimension of experience operates as the condition for the
possibility of natural scientific objectivity. Chapter 2 scrutinizes Deleuze’s
characterization of intensity as a transcendental concept rather than a scientific one
against the background of his metaphysics of difference and his critique of the
shortcomings of Kant’s transcendental idealism for addressing the transcendental
conditions for the genesis of real experience. Through a reading of Deleuze’s
metaphysics of difference and intensity in connection to his confinement of the
creative productivity of scientific thought to a plane of reference, I argue that the
creativity apropos to the scientific engagement with material reality necessitates that
such creativity is conditioned by the same transcendental considerations operative in a
metaphysics of difference at a broad scale. Against the backdrop of Husserl’s and
Deleuze’s respective criticisms of the inadequacy of Kant’s transcendental idealism
for articulating the material component of experience, Chapter 3 studies Kant’s later
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conception of ether as the simultaneously empirical and transcendental condition for
the possibility and unity of experience. Through an examination of Kant’s renewed
understanding of materiality as the necessary and sufficient condition for scientific
objectivity in connection with the problematic objectivity of the transcendental ideas
created by pure reason in Kant’s Critical philosophy, I suggest that Kant’s later
articulation of materiality on transcendental grounds simultaneously addresses the
objectivity and the creativity pertinent to the encounter of scientific Thought with
material/physical reality.