Category: Transcendental Philosophy
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Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity
Top o' the Stack. UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc." https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz
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Soul as Homunculus? On Homuncular Explanation
The following quotation is reproduced verbatim from Michael Gilleland's classics blog, Laudator Temporis Acti: Augustine, Sermons 241.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1134; tr. Edmund Hill): They could see their bodies, they couldn't see their souls. But they could only see the body from the soul. I mean, they saw with their eyes, but inside there was…
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The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God: A First Response to Flood
I thank Anthony G. Flood for his The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella. Herewith, a first installment by way of rejoinder. Convergence upon agreement is not to be expected, but clarification of differences is an attainable goal. In any case, philosophy is a joy to its…
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Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism
The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote: We need to bear in mind that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument…
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Against H. A. Prichard and the ‘Standard Picture’ of Kant
In an earlier post, drawing on the work of Henry E. Allison, I wrote: The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim is to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports…
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Berkeleyan and Kantian Idealism: How Do They Differ?
The good bishop, as Kant called him, held that reality is exhausted by "spirits" and their ideas. Thus on Berkeley's scheme everything is either a spiritual substance or mind, whether finite or infinite (God), or else an idea 'in' a mind. Ideas are thus modes or modifications of minds. As such they do not exist…
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Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity
New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental…
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The Grand Central Polarity: Objective and Subjective
Objectively viewed, an individual human life is next-to-nothing: a fleeting occurrence in the natural world. But we know this, and we know it as subjects for whom there is a world of nature. If objectively we are next-to-nothing, subjectively we are everything. "When I die, the world ends." The thought expressed by this sentence is…
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Notes on the Introduction to Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh
I have Steven Nemes to thank for introducing me to the thought of Michel Henry. I recall as a graduate student in the 'seventies having seen a big fat tome published in 1973 by Martinus Nijhoff entitled The Essence of Manifestation by one Michel Henry. I may have paged through parts of it back then,…
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A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego
The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020) ……………………….. Dear Bill, You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this: What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist?…
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On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’
A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept. Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance. 1) In the planetary sense, the…
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Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?
Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons. Part I: Methodological Incompatibility Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation. Thus…
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Is Assertion External or Internal to Logic? A Note on Irad Kimhi
The main point of Peter Geach's paper, "Assertion" (Logic Matters, Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 254-269) is what he calls the Frege point: A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition.…
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Objective Truth as a Condition of Intelligibility
John D. Caputo has recently made the fashionably outlandish claim that "what modern philosophers call 'pure' reason . . . is a white male Euro-Christian construction." Making this claim, Caputo purports to be saying something that is true. Moreover, his making of the claim in public is presumably for the purpose of convincing us that…