Transcendental Philosophy Research Articles

HUSSERL’S LANGUAGE OF NEUTRALITY

Husserl intended the phenomenological method as a new beginning for philosophy. The epoché, the key notion of this method, entails a modification of attitude such that it can completely cancel and disempower all that might be given to us and that might be used for philosophical inquiry. In Ideas I, in particular, this is addressed as the “neutrality modification,” and defined as a universal modification of consciousness that permeates the phenomenological attitude. Neutralization, along with the method, is described by relying on what Husserl calls the “language of neutrality,” which is actually spoken while investigating in the phenomenological attitude, enacted in the descriptions, and also discloses a series of rather peculiar acts that must be performed in order to obtain the phenomenological attitude. This paper discusses the phenomenological language of neutrality, first presenting what “neutrality” means, as well as illustrating the essential expressions of this peculiar language (such as “to put out of action,” “to bracket,” “to suspend,” and so on), then situating it in the context of phenomenological analyses, particularly as regards those devoted to phantasy experiences. Finally, going back to early interpretations of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, notably the critical readings provided by Levinas and Fink, some key features of the method of epoché are pointed out, suggesting that the study of the specific neutrality involved in the latter can contribute to answering the question of what kind of act epoché is, and if it can even be considered an act at all.

Martin Heidegger's Transcendental Ontology

Heidegger’s criticism of the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Husserl is primarily leveled at its underlying understanding of the transcendental subject. Heidegger argues that in order to give an adequate account of the intelligibility of the world, the transcendental subject must be factical. By discussing central aspects of Heidegger’s criticism, this paper shows that his notion of a factical transcendental subject is a necessary step out of aporias of transcendental philosophy. I argue that Heidegger’s emphasis on the facticity of the human being must be understood not as an abandonment of the transcendental standpoint, but as a radicalization of its central ideas. Heidegger is thereby transforming transcendental philosophy into a transcendental ontology. I demonstrate that this allows Heidegger to reconceptualize the constitution of the world as social and historical without having to jettison the role of the transcendental subject.

The Concept of 'Love' in Transcendent Philosophy: A Comparison between Mullā Ṣadrā and Plato

ABSTRACT: With a mystico-philosophical approach, using the ontological principles of the transcendent philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā, this paper attempts to examine a new perspective on the concept of 'love', the most mysterious feeling of the human being. The discussion will focus on ontological and psychological analysis of the concept of love as 'affection of male to female or female to male'. By affection, I mean that romantic feeling that appears in many human beings which is much deeper than parental love or the love between spouses; it reaches a degree at which the lover goes beyond his normal state, loses the ability to eat or sleep, and all his attention is directed to his beloved. The nature of this state comprises one of the main themes of poetry, literature and art in all cultures throughout the history of mankind. It is also examined in philosophy and modern psychology. This paper proposes a novel interpretation of love, contending that it extends beyond mere obsession or spiritual fervour. Rather than solely dominating the minds of lovers or being confined to moments of heightened spirituality, love is portrayed as an existential reality characterised by diverse levels and stages. Much like existence itself, love exhibits multiple dimensions of objectivity, challenging conventional perspectives and offering a more comprehensive understanding of its essence.

A Comparative and Contrastive Analysis of the Emerson Philosophical Essays and Ghaani's Distress

In this study, Mirza Habibollah Shirazi’s (Ghaani) Distress was compared with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s two philosophical essays “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” in light of philosophical and moral views. The study aimed at comparison of these two contemporaneous poets and writers to trace the similarity, differences and source of their teachings, because the rearcher assumed the two thinkers have many ideas in common. To perform the study, the main ideas in the selected works of the two poets were analyzed in length and then their works were compared and contrasted. Results of the analysis indicated that In Emerson’s “Nature,” God is present in nature and man is not separable from metaphysical order. “Self-Reliance” emphasized non-conformity and dependence of the individual self. Ghanni’s Distress was described as a window to Eastern metaphysics that specified didactic implications. Emerson uses a general idea of philosophy of nature’s utility and then focuses on deductive reasoning. In addition, Emerson philosophy of transcendental and metaphysical philosophy represents perception of nature and self in an independent philosophy and strengthened diverse education of Eastern philosophy and poetry. Ghaani is merely advocator of Sa’di’s style and educational teachings.

Is Kant's Revolution in Philosophy a Copernican Turn?

There is a widespread misunderstanding in Kant scholarship, partly due to Kant himself, as to his comparison of transcendental philosophy with Copernican revolution in its standard sense as a shift of scientific paradigms. However, there is a reason to think, that this analogy is not correct: what corresponds to it in his system of transcendental philosophy, makes a necessary and basic, but nevertheless a detail of all system, and that which can truly characterize a detail, will be incorrect in relation to the whole. The fundamental in modern Kant scholarship Allison's book«Kant’s TranscendentalIdealism» is chosen as an example of such incorrect characteristic. In my paper I prove, that acceptance of analogy of transcendental philosophy with Copernican revolution leads us to erroneous representation of the former as a kind of anthropocentrism in its phenomenalistic or subjective-idealistic form. Instead of understanding Kant’s revolution as a replacement of one kind of monismby another to what its comparison with Copernican revolution forces, I propose to understand it as a replacement of different kinds of monism, coexisted in Kant’s days in the form of «war of schools», by dualism.

Which Comes First—Acting or Judging?

It is one of the crucial insights of pragmatism that our judging is itself a discursive practice. Our judgments are normatively determined performances for which we are responsible. Therefore, judgments are a species of action. For in both actions and judgments, we subject ourselves and others to justifiable norms. Since these insights can already be found in Hegel, Hegel is now often interpreted as a champion of pragmatism. Hegel’s logic is thereby mainly understood as the continuation of the Kantian project of transcendental philosophy. Based upon this pragmatist interpretation of Hegel, the paper reads F. H. Jacobi’s philosophy as an alternative pragmatism which is explicitly founded on our life praxis rather than our practice of judgment.

Трансцендентальность гуманитарного познания

The article regards the principal aspects by which cognition in the humanities is different from that in natural sciences. If the task of transcendental philosophy is the analysis of general conditions of our experience, such status can be prescribed to all disciplines that study human as a subject. General conditions of experience determine our experience even when we make them the object of analysis. Marx’s and Manheim’s sociology of knowledge is used as an example to show that sociology of knowledge as a study of the dependence of social ideas on social interests remains inside the domain of its own laws. This fact gives us the opportunity to treat it not as an objective science, but rather as hermeneutics. Its main purpose is not to unmask other people’s ideological illusions. So­ciology of knowledge is rather a way of self-understanding, which affords us to pay at­tention to our own possible ideological bias. Structuralism and cognitive sciences as at­tempts at a scientific analysis of humans and society try to ignore the transcendental na­ture of their conclusions. If some fundamental structure underlies all our intellectual ac­tivity, it should control the perspective that structuralists take on it as well. If our self is an illusion formed by the objective neuronic dynamics, as cognitivists assert, they lose the right to reason in first person, to put goals of developing our consciousness in a par­ticular direction. As long as we study the man and society in the humanities, our knowl­edge has a transcendental status. The humanities do not study some object that is external to us. They do not give us technical knowledge or technological recipes. Their goal is to make our self-understanding deeper.

Кантовский «коперниканский переворот»: синтез эмпирического реализма и трансцендентального идеализма

Transcendental philosophy of Kant is the first theory of experience (scientific knowledge) related to the solution of the (semantic) problem set in his famous letter to M. Hertz: what is the ground of the relation of the representation to the object? There are two ways to solve it, and Kant himself chooses the sec­ond of them, thus making his “Copernican Revolution”. Does the idea that Kant is an idealist follow from that, all the more as he often refers to his phi­losophy as to transcendental idealism? The analysis of the internal structure of this revolution shows that it is possible to highlight two vectors: the empiri­cal, from the thing-in-itself to representations, and the noumenal ones, from the transcendental unity of apperception or transcendental object to the thing-as-it-appears-to-us. Keeping empirical vector says that Kant’s theory of experi­ence is an empirical realism and his transcendentalism is a reflective (meta – level) epistemological (methodological) superstructure above it. Our semantic interpretation of Kant meets the modern “revolutionary” interpretation of tran­scendentalism, developed in the works of G. Bird, G. Prauss, H. Allison et al., which was called as the theory of “two aspects”. On this basis, we develop a realistic interpretation transcendentalism, which is relatable to the contem­porary interpretation of Kant, represented in works of W. Röd, A. Collins, P. Abela, K. Westphal, L. Allais and others.

Art and culture: Aesthetic ideas of V.E. Sesemann

The article provides an analysis of the aesthetic views of one of an interesting and original, but still, unfortunately, little studied Russian philosopher, V.E. Sesemann (1884–1963). Aesthetics occupied a leading position in Seseman’s philosophical constructions, while remaining fully embedded in the philosophy of the Russian thinker. Continuing the traditions of transcendental philosophy, Sesemann considers aesthetics as a general theoretical discipline that combines all private and separate studies of the theme of beauty. As in his theory of knowledge, the fundamental element of his aesthetics is the phenomenon of experience, which is the general pre-subject basis of Sesemann’s entire philosophical system. At the same time, however, aesthetic experience, in contrast to experience as such, is experience of a special kind. When identifying the specifics of aesthetic experience, the Russian philosopher attaches special importance to the study of the problem of form, which explains his attention to the work of Russian formalists. Arguing with the formalists and the German art theorist Heinrich Wölfflin and defending the nature of the form as lively and rhythmic, he also sees the positive aspects of these teachings. Sesemann develops his aesthetic ideas in a discussion with contemporary aesthetic theories. It is emphasized that Sesemann addressed the problems of aesthetics throughout his life and expressed his views on a variety of aesthetic problems: from theoretical and methodological to concrete practical and even applied ones. In his aesthetic concept, the Russian philosopher Vasily Emilevich Seseman tries to productively synthesize neo-Kantian and phenomenological approaches.

CARTESIAN “I THINK, THEREFORE, I AM” IN THE PERSPECTIVES OF LOGIC AND PHENOMENOLOGY

In this article the questions under discussion are the properties of Descartes’s application of the first rule of his method, which requires not to agree with anything that could give rise to doubt. It is well known that Descartes came to the conclusion that only the truth “I think, therefore I am” is undoubted. The article examines the logical status of this truth and reveals that it is an entimeme where the major premise is unstated. An analysis of Descartes’s works shows that the premise that he does not explicitly express is the proposition “If I think, therefore I exist, and if I do not think, then I do not exist.” It follows that Descartes’ complete syllogism would be like this: “I exist if and only if I think; I think; therefore, I exist.” In this paper, the discussion focuses on the proof of the certainty of the position “I exist,” proposed by St Augustin in his treatise The City of God. St Augustin proves the proposition “I am deceived that I exist” to be false in every possible interpretation. Hence the position “I exist” is true in every possible interpretation. According to Descartes, the only undoubted statements are those that are kept within the limits of “I think,” or within the limits of inner experience, while the data of external experience are always dubious. Thus, the statement “I walk” is not obvious, since it can only seem to me that I am walking. At the same time, the judgment “It seems to me that I walk” is undoubtedly. Ancient sceptics also believed that the data of internal experience are doubtless, and the data of external experience are not due to the fact that all objects of the external world are in fact not what they seem to be. However, there is a significant difference between the ancient sceptical approach and that of Descartes. I put forward the view that the ancient sceptics, although they are convinced that the things of the external world are not what they seem, still surely believe that each item in that world exists. But Descartes surpassed both ancient sceptics and academics in their scepticism, since he doubted the very existence of the external world. He was able to imagine that he exists exclusively as a thinking entity with no body, no world around him, and no space to store that world. It is by the fact that Descartes doubts the existence of the external world that he has cleared the way for transcendental philosophy and phenomenology.

Review of the 7th International Workshop "Transcendental Turn in Contemporary Philosophy"

From April 21 to April 23, 2022, the 7th annual International Scientific Conference “The Transcendental Turn in Contemporary Philosophy: Epistemology, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence” was held in Moscow. Traditionally, transcendental workshops present three main lines of transcendentalism, which go back to I. Kant's own transcendental idealism, neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology. In 2022, the Kantian and neo-Kantian days of the seminar were associated with the development of the ideas of cognitive science, transcendental epistemology, artificial intelligence and transcendental philosophy of science, and as part of the phenomenological day, the issue of the role of reflection in the structure of cognitive activity was discussed in detail.

At the limits of knowledge: Philosophy and religion in Southwestern Neo-Kantianism

The present paper investigates the essential tenets of the Southwestern Neo-Kantians? take on the philosophy of religion. Specifically, I concentrate on two diverse aspects of Windelband and Rickert?s approaches to religion. In the first place, I look at the way in which they determine religious values. In the second place, I focus on the manner in which they confront religion with the systematic structure of culture. As a result of the analysis of the texts of both authors, we see that it is possible to detect at least three possible roads to elaborate a philosophy of religion. In spite of this plurality of paths, I argue that they exhibit a similar underlying problem, namely, the problematic relationship between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics. It is for this reason that the philosophy of religion takes the form of a reflection on the limits of knowledge, and with it, on the limits of transcendental philosophy.

Teorijski sufizam - periodizacija istorije discipline

Theoretical Sufism is an ontology formulated by prominent Muslim mystics. They are primarily known for their intuitive experiences in the highest realms of total existence. In the light of the final intuitions, these mystics got the opportunity to present a new system of ontology, that is, mystical knowledge about the problem of being in general. The answer to the questions about what reality is and how it really exists they provided through their spiritual experiences when they directly, with the eye of the heart, saw the most hidden secrets of existence and on that basis they built a system of knowledge about all lower levels of the universe. Muslims had intuitive knowledge with ontological content ever since the earliest period of the emergence of Islam. However, the results of their mystical effort, when ontological and metaphysical questions are involved, were not united in a separate study discipline. The discipline, which would be called theoretical Sufism, was officially established in the 13th century by the famous Ibn ʻArabī, and his students and influential representatives of his school will continuously improve and strengthen the structural order of the new ontological discipline in the cognitive tradition of Islam. At the beginning of the 17th century, Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī made one of the biggest turning points in the history of Muslim thought when, in his new philosophical school, which he called transcendent philosophy, he proved the truth of the ontological principles of theoretical Sufism with grounded philosophical demonstrations. Mullā Ṣadrā himself explained that by uniting Islamic philosophy and theoretical Sufism, he actually completed the mission of philosophy and metaphysics in general.

워즈워스의 빌둥과 숭고: 쉴러의 미학으로 『서곡』 읽기

This paper is an attempt to re-examine Wordsworth’s poetic claim of his spiritual growth in The Prelude with German ideas of Bildung and the sublime. I start with Schlegel’s remarks that the prevailing tendencies of his age are the French Revolution, Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, and Wilhelm Meister, which I think could also be an apt summary of what is contained in The Prelude because all the Bildungsgeschichte of the age across Europe were motivated more or less by the same historical occasion, the French Revolution. Bildung, in this context, may well be understood as the process of materializing in an individual’s life the idea of freedom, one of the ideals the French Revolution was supposed to make into reality, which would explain why The Prelude should be understood along with its German equivalents in the same philosophical context. My argument is that Wordsworth’s poetic claim of his own poetic growth could best be made sense of by Schiller’s idea of “pathetic sublime” because Wordsworth’s Bildung in The Prelude is prominently accelerated by the “sublime” experiences within the key episodes such as Simplon Pass, Snowdon, and the “Sleep no more” scene of Book X. In the first main section, I recover Goethe’s idea of Bildung from his classic Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr for the comparison with the other kinds of Bildung in Wordsworth’s poetry. In the second, I explained the Bildung of “Tintern Abbey” which is based mainly on British empiricist philosopher such as David Hartley. In the third, I critically reviewed the works by other scholars who have studied The Prelude in the light of Kantian sublime to prepare my own reading of The Prelude with Schillerian sublime as the rationale for Wordsworth’s Bildung in the final section.

Thought, Being, and the Given in Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob

The goal of the present paper is to assess Hans Vaihinger’s understanding of the notion of the given in Die Philosophie des Als Ob. The claim will be advanced that the overall framework of Vaihinger’s theory of knowledge and, more specifically, his understanding of both the given and fictions should be sought for in the manner in which R. Hermann Lotze assesses the problem of knowledge, namely, the relation between thought and being in both his early and late Logik. As we will argue, the way in which Vaihinger recasts the opposition between what is given objectively (data of sensations) and what is added subjectively is to be deemed a direct radicalization of Lotze’s own stance. As the conclusion will further add, what is at stake in Vaihinger’s fictionalism is a quite specific understanding of the ideas of reason and transcendental philosophy.

Explaining the Ontological Differences between Islamic Transcendent Philosophy and Emergentism on the Soul-Body Problem

Explaining the Ontological Differences between Islamic Transcendent Philosophy and Emergentism on the Soul-Body Problem

Postmetaphysical Conundrums: The Problematic Return to Metaphysics in Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason

Postmetaphysical Conundrums: The Problematic Return to Metaphysics in Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason

German Idealism and the Origins of Pure Mathematics: Riemann, Dedekind, Cantor

When it comes to the relation of modern mathematics and philosophy, most people tend to think of the three major schools of thought—i.e. logicism, formalism, and intuitionism—that emerged as profound researches on the foundations and nature of mathematics in the beginning of the 20th century and have shaped the dominant discourse of an autonomous discipline of analytic philosophy, generally known under the rubric of “philosophy of mathematics” since then. What has been completely disregarded by these philosophical attitudes, these foundational researches which seek to provide pure mathematics with a philosophically plausible justification by founding it on firm logico-philosophical bases, is that the genuine self-foundation of pure mathematics had been done before, namely during the 19th century, when it was developing into an entirely new and independent discipline as a concomitant of the continuous dissociation of mathematics from the physical world. This self-foundation of the 19th-century pure mathematics, however, was more akin to the German-idealist interpretations of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, than the post-factum, retrospective 20th-century researches on the foundations of mathematics. This article aims to demonstrate this neglected historical fact via delving into the philosophical inclinations of the three major founders of the 19th-century pure mathematics, Riemann, Dedekind and Cantor. Consequently, pure mathematics, with respect to its idealist origins, proves to be a formalization and idealization of certain activities specific to a self-conscious transcendental subjectivity.

Reconsidering Kant’s Rejection of Indirect Arguments in Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract Immanuel Kant states that indirect arguments are not suitable for the purposes of transcendental philosophy. If he is correct, this affects contemporary versions of transcendental arguments which are often used as an indirect refutation of scepticism. I discuss two reasons for Kant’s rejection of indirect arguments. Firstly, Kant argues that we are prone to misapply the law of excluded middle in philosophical contexts. Secondly, Kant points out that indirect arguments lack some explanatory power. They can show that something is true but they do not provide insight into why something is true. Using mathematical proofs as examples, I show that this is because indirect arguments are non-constructive. From a Kantian point of view, transcendental arguments need to be constructive in some way. In the last part of the paper, I briefly examine a comment made by P. F. Strawson. In my view, this comment also points toward a connection between transcendental and constructive reasoning.

Some late questions about Transcendental Philosophy and its resignification by Philosophical Semantics

Some late questions about Transcendental Philosophy and its resignification by Philosophical Semantics