Transcendental Idealism and Naturalism: The Case of Fichte

Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2013

If one disputes the ontological content of the naturalism that is involved in the naturalization of the mind, it seems that, inasmuch as naturalism corresponds to some methodological claims, it goes with a certain idea of what reality is, that is ‘objectivism’. The purpose of this paper is to examine the criticisms that phenomenology expresses towards ‘objectivism’, and hence towards naturalism, and the way phenomenologists (and Merleau-Ponty in particular) fall or try to avoid falling into traps similar to it. Here the traps of ‘idealism’ in its various forms are in a sense deeper than the traps of naturalism. We would like to suggest that there exists some idealist solidarity between naturalism and transcendentalism and that therefore any real philosophical criticism of naturalism that undermines its ontological reductionism, whether it is phenomenological or not, should renounce any form of transcendentalism.

in Responses to Naturalism: Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism, Paul Giladi (ed.), 2019, Routledge

Naturalism, in its scientific as well as in certain forms of its so-called liberal versions, for example the subject naturalism of Huw Price, gives natural scientific accounts of reality priority over any other kind of explanation. A corollary of this position is that philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences, with the claims of the natural sciences taking priority over any philosophical claims. There is a tradition of idealist thought, starting with Kant, which opposes this naturalist framework. Instead of taking the results of science as a starting point, it asks about the presuppositions of scientific enquiry. In this effort it highlights the fact that the explanatory framework of natural science seems to already presuppose and depend on a different explanatory framework, one associated with the mind or the subject. This observation has the implication that the mind or the subject cannot be given a complete natural scientific account, as naturalism seems to claim. This is a transcendental form of argument against naturalism: If the conditions for the possibility of natural scientific accounts cannot themselves be given a scientific account, then naturalism’s claim about the priority of scientific accounts does not hold. It is also an idealist argument against naturalism to the extent that the explanatory framework it gives priority to is that of the mind. In this paper I briefly highlight the origins of this line of thought in Kant, and then move on to show how it echoes in Hegel’s as well as in Husserl’s accounts of the relationship between mind and scientific explanations of nature. For Kant, the explanatory framework that takes priority over that of science is that of the understanding, conditioning the ways in which nature can be intelligible. This position leads to well-rehearsed complications to do with the transcendental ego’s status as something super-sensible. What I want to argue in this paper is that Hegel’s claim of the priority of spirit over nature, as well as Husserl’s claim regarding the priority of the life world over the explanations offered by science, can be read as ways of preserving the transcendental, as well as the idealist nature of Kant’s argument against naturalism, whilst avoiding the unwanted complications to do with the transcendental ego. Ultimately this idealist tradition makes available a conception of philosophy that is contrary to the one currently dominating naturalist platforms, namely one according to which it is philosophy that enjoys a logical priority over the claims of the natural sciences, not the other way around.

Fichteana, Review of J.G. Fichte Scholarhip, Vol. 23

Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy, 2014

The major debate in late twentieth-century analytical philosophy turns on the questions of the purpose, uniqueness and results of transcendental arguments. I pursue this debate in reference to Fichte the first thinker after Kant (and before Cohen, Cassirer, Apel, etc.), to claim the title of "transcendental philosopher". In this respect, it is to be noted that while only two instances of transcendental argument may be taken seriously in the works of Kant, Fichte's Science of Knowing is in all significant respects the most accomplished and systematic development of what Strawson has called transcendental argumentation. More than that, Fichte's mode of reasoning is what unifies and gives continuity to the successive versions of his science of knowing, thus suggesting a form of transcendental argument that potentially has great significance for the contemporary debate. In this perspective, it is useful to reassess in the light of Fichte's philosophy a series of major questions raised by analytical philosophy: How is transcendental argument related to skepticism? How original and specific is it? And, last but not least, what does it accomplish?

Naturalism in Question, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004

In this paper we shall attempt to sketch one of the most radical forms of naturalism formulated within the analytic tradition, that of Wilfrid Sellars (with its interesting combination of scientific and liberal naturalist elements), to show its intimate relation with the rejection of the myth of the Given in its most general form, and to suggest that some classic forms of transcendental phenomenology, namely Husserl's 'noesis-noema correlation', and, more controversially, Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'motor intentionality', fall prey to this most general form of the myth of the Given, i.e. the categorial Given. It will be further suggested that the late Merleau-Ponty may stand a chance of escaping the Myth, albeit only at the cost of blurring the boundaries between phenomenology and nonphenomenological (non-descriptive) philosophical standpoints. Finally, one of the main aims of the paper is to exhibit the intimate connection that exists between the rejection of the myth of the Given and a commitment to a certain peculiar brand of ontological naturalism. More specifically, it aims to show that 1) the resolute rejection of the categorial Given goes hand in hand with the acceptance of a scientific naturalism that makes room for the transcendental, albeit in a de-phenomenologized sense of the term, and that, 2) correlatively, the resort to the categorial Given turns out to be the unacknowledged cost of the anti-naturalism characteristic of Husser's and Merlaeu-Ponty's version of transcendental phenomenology.

Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, 2005

In this paper I shall discuss McGinn's transcendental naturalism (TN) and the reasons he gives in order to show that philosophy will always be just a cluster of mysteries without answers. I shall show that the three main arguments he gives for TN are inconclusive and that a modular architecture of the mind he presupposes is not committed to the epistemic thesis of TN, the idea that we are "cognitively closed" to answering some questions about consciousness, meaning, knowledge and the like.

Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie. Band 34 (2019). Natur und Schöpfung, 2020

Whereas natural theology is commonly understood to mean a kind of rational intelligibility of nature, which through the opening up of the structure of creation can give us insight into the mind and intentions of God, there are various Christian authors who fall outside this particular definition. The author who comes immediately to my mind is Johannes Scottus Eriugena (810-877 CE), who has opted for a division rather than a definition of nature and in the process conjures up a comprehensive idea of natura that includes the divine. Thus, he suspends the traditional divide between the creator and creation, coming dangerously close, in the eyes of some, to a form of pantheism, for which he was condemned in 1225. Yet his work is in many ways comparable to patristic authors like Ambrose and Augustine in that half of his Periphyseon (“On Natures”) consists of a Hexaemeron-commentary, that is, an exposition of the six days of creation. In light of that fact, his condemnation is curious, as his orthodoxy need not be doubted. With the traditional category of natural theology is not hospitable to Eriugena’s ground-breaking work, maybe the problem does not lie with Eriugena’s work but with the category, that is, with the way natural theology has traditionally, and scholastically, been read and interpreted. In search of a comparandum for Eriugena’s more dynamic and comprehensive nature, and for his Periphyseon which I have come to distinguish from traditional natural theology by seeing it as an attempt to “think nature,” that is, to encounter nature in thought, I settled on the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson as someone who is likewise interested in a wide approach to natural theology and is similarly engaged in an attempt to ‘think nature,’ that is, to bring out nature as we follow and try to capture its luster in full flight. In investigating this more dynamic sense of natural theology in the context of North American and continental modernity, it becomes clear that it is not only nature that matters as the object of investigation but also the human self as the subject. In other words, this kind of Eriugenian-Emersonian natural theology does not leave one’s self-reflection untouched but also engages or draws on the idea of human experience. The current article focuses mostly on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose original insights it tries to explore and bring out by putting him in the company of Schleiermacher on the one hand, with whom Emerson reveals certain similarities both in approach and in choice of topic, and William James on the other, whose religious take is more pronounced and whose religious contribution has been more famous and lasting in the North American context. I nevertheless maintain that Emerson is the richer of the three thinkers as a religious herald of North American modernity, one for whom the original human religious posture requires an original relation to the universe, which is appropriately echoed in the inexhaustible capaciousness of his thinking on nature.

New ideas in psychology, 2006

In this article, an account is given of the relation between naturalism and transcendentalism in the current project of naturalizing phenomenology. This project usually takes the transcendental point of view to be in conflict with the naturalizing attitude and the contemporary sciences of cognition thus seem to require cutting Husserlian phenomenology from its anti-naturalist roots, i.e., naturalizing it. Yet, in abandoning both the anti-naturalist and the transcendental attitude, the naturalizing project has dropped the epistemological concerns and has concentrated on naturalizing phenomenology’s descriptive results concerning consciousness and subjective experience. This omission of Husserlian epistemology has a number of consequences for the naturalizing project itself. We want to examine these consequences, and, further, we want to see whether it is possible to combine a transcendental perspective with a naturalistic one. This amounts to asking whether it is possible to naturalize the transcendental–epistemological, and thus to give a naturalistic account, not only of subjective and conscious experience, but also of the epistemological part of Husserl’s project.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2007

Gü nter Zö ller Il faut une philosophie de croyance, d'enthousiasme; une philosophie qui confirme par la raison ce que le sentiment nous révèle. 1