Murray Miles

This paper argues that, far from supporting, an oft-cited passage of the Phenomena and Noumena chapter (A247/B303) instead belies, Allison’s influential thesis that Kant’s transcendental idealism is not an ‘alternative ontology’ but a methodological or meta-epistemological ‘alternative to ontology’ that is devoid of specific metaphysical content. Following a programmatic sketch of Kant’s system of principles as a regional ontology of nature, it is argued that the precise wording and original punctuation of that passage suggest that the transcendentally realist ontologies of the past are to ‘give way’ to just such an immanent ontology of the world of outer experience.

Detailed analysis of the expression ‘things in general and in themselves’ reveals two further uses of ‘noumenon’ (and ‘thing in itself’) in addition to the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ senses distinguished by Kant himself. It follows (pace various ‘reductive’ interpretations) that Kant’s transcendental distinction comprises four different contrasts. On a new resolution of the long-running ‘one or two objects?’ dispute, there follows a complete re-interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction as a meta-metaphysical thought experiment. It has the ‘metaphysical density’ necessary to forestall charges of ‘innocuousness’ without giving purchase to the well-known objections that have dogged Kant’s transcendental distinction from its inception.

The subject of this essay is philosophy, its place in the university, and the role of philosophy and university studies within what the late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott has called "the conversation of mankind." But we are not going to begin, as it may seem we should, with a definition of "philosophy." The immediate task is rather to say something about the issues with which philosophers concern themselves and to discuss certain misconceptions which are very widespread and which most of those who embark on a study of philosophy will either share at the outset or very soon encounter. In saying what philosophy is not we shall have entered into the discussion of what philosophy is, but only in a very preliminary and indirect way. Nevertheless, this will suffice for our present purpose, which is to offer a reflection upon the goals of university education.

The problem of the person may be described as the crux of Descartes' philosophy in the fairly obvious literal sense that it is the point of intersection of the two chief axes of the system, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. The actual, if not professed aim of the former is the ousting of the occult powers and faculties of Scholastic-Aristotelian physics by the mechanical concept of force or action-by-contact. The chief tenet of the latter is that mind, whose essence is thinking, is clearly and distinctly conceivable apart from matter, the essence of which is extension. From this, by an illicit inference which need not concern us further, Descartes concludes that the mind is “really distinct” from matter, that is, a substance capable of existing apart from body in its own right. Where these two lines of thought meet, the problem of the person constitutes itself in the following manner.

With the systematic aim of clarifying the phenomenon sometimes described as “the intellectual apprehension of first principles,” Descartes’ first principle par excellence is interpreted before the historical backcloth of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. To begin with, three “faces” of the cogito are distinguished: (1) the proto-cogito (“I think”), (2) the cogito proper (“I think, therefore I am”), and (3) the cogito principle (“Whatever thinks, is”). There follows a detailed (though inevitably somewhat conjectural) reconstruction of the transition of the mind from (1) via (3) to (2) and back again to (3). What emerges is, surprisingly, a non-circular, non-logical, and ultimately non-mysterious process by which first principles implicitly contained in a complex intuition are gradually rendered explicit (and, if abstract, grasped in their abstract universality). This process bears a striking family resemblance to that intuitive induction (“grasping the universal in the particular”) which Aristotle scholars have distinguished from empirical forms of induction.

RésuméLa critique kantienne de la psychologie rationnelle est une expérience de pensée visant ni un individu ni une école, mais une tendance de la raison humaine à « hypostasier » la condition intellectuelle suprême d'une connaissance quelconque (le « Je pense ») en connaissance du « moi ». Cette tendance implique une circularité qui est également la cible des critiques transcendantales bien plus familières qui visent Locke et Hume. De même qu'un nouveau type de cercle (dit « de niveau »), cet article propose une conception des arguments transcendantaux différente de celle présupposée dans la plupart des débats contemporains sur l'empirisme, le naturalisme et le fondationnalisme cartésien.