Cartesian Intuition. A Cleansed Cartesianism

Abstract

For the contemporary philosophy of the mental, it is fruitful for us to return to Cartesian intuition and to attempt to present a “cleansed Cartesianism”, because the intuition takes effect in the fields of epistemology, semantic and linguistic internalism, externalism, and linguistics (Chomsky, Fodor). In this article, we present a series of six following sketches (1.-5.), leading towards a new correction of Cartesian internalism which we hope will cleanse and unleash a fresh outlook on Cartesianism because if we are to finally put aside pragmatism, we must realize that Cartesianism is in the offing when it comes to the lively scholarly discourse around the philosophy of the mind and related subjects: the feature of the subject’s point of view (1.); the dilemma of Cartesian knowledge (2.); a review of Cartesian reflection (3.); the ‘Kantian I’ (as well as Castaneda’s reinterpretation of it) (5.); the monadological foundation of subjectivity (7.); we conclude with a correction and outlook (7.). We find it of particular interest to connect what we call the ‘dilemma of Cartesian knowledge’ (2.) with “Fichte’s original insight” (4.), Reinhold’s “Elementary Philosophy”, and the “Early Romance ‘Constellation’ (6.) as rediscovered by Dieter Henrich and continued by Manfred Frank. The foundational subject here is the regress and circle as well as the problem of “philosophical deduction” in the philosophy of reflection, Elementary Philosophy, and German Idealism in general. Manfred Frank long connected this problem to contemporary philosophy of the mental (mind), as we describe in “The Early Romance Constellation” and “Fichte’s Original Insight” (6., 4.) The rebuilding of a Cartesian view hints that we might well promote the theme of pre-reflective consciousness—going back to Jean-Paul Sartre—within the new architecture of philosophy of the mental as a fundamental question.Neither in the rationalistic or the empiricist accounts of “modern philosophy” nor within the discourse around German Idealism has pre-reflective consciousness been recognized adequately. Looking back, the important matteris following: Within modern egology, the function of pre-reflective consciousness is covered by the I-axiom as the foundation of knowledge. We conclude with a correction of the Cartesian view, the limit of self-consciousness, and a brief treatment of current cooperations of the European and American philosophers exchange (7.)