TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND NATURALISM

Aurora Simone (2019). On the transcendental – Part III. Metodo 1.3, pp. 7-12., 2019

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Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, 2005

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Crítica (México D. F. En línea), 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.

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2019

The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans) – which roamed Aristotle’s categories, impervious to univocal abstraction. To traditional realists with an interest in distinguishing the mind-dependent from the real, these properties carried the unwelcome implication that it is not possible to state univocally how individuals exist in their own right, independently of how we think about them. Instead, properties like “thing,” “otherness,” “unity,” “goodness,” and “truth” pervade every category. As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode unavailable to our experience. However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum (the first and undifferentiated experience of being), which secures a terminus in the real for experience of the transcendentals. In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, the significance of which Powell rediscovered in the 20th century, and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” making the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations. This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real, contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.

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2015

The proper relationship between phenomenology and naturalism has reemerged as a pressing issue following interdisciplinary developments in the cognitive sciences. Most solutions opt for a naturalized phenomenology, rather than a phenomenological naturalism. This paper takes up the latter approach, confronting the implications of Merleau-Ponty's reformulation of Husserl's paradox of subjectivity. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's formulation—which I term, “the paradox of madness”—reveals a deep, ontological contingency in what Husserl took to be necessary transcendental structures of consciousness and world, revealing that these transcendental structures are in fact embedded in and contaminated by the very world they constitute and disclose.

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HORIZON / Fenomenologicheskie issledovanija/ STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE / STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY / ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES, 2018

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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.

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China Review International, 2019

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Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in transcendental philosophy, sparked by debates surrounding the question of the (im)possibility of naturalizing phenomenology. However, it is often the case that these debates fail to appreciate the alterations that the notion of " the transcendental " has undergone since Kant first introduced his system of transcendental idealism. The paper intends to critically examine some of these changes, arguing that Husserl's " transcendental turn " , although significantly altering Kant's original conception, remained faithful to the project of transcendentalism and wrought in its wake important resources for Merleau-Ponty's subsequent elaborations. The central part of the paper takes us through three conceptions — from Kant's " transcendentalism of faculties " , through Husserl's " transcendentalism of pure consciousness " , to Merleau-Ponty's " transcendentalism of the flesh " — arguing that they constitute a coherent transcendentalist " thought style ". In the final section , we claim that these progressive alterations in the meaning of the transcendental project can shed light on the debate about the (im)possibility of naturalizing phenomenology. We do this by providing a notion of the transcendental that makes room for the " truth of naturalism " , while simultaneously insisting on the necessity of a reverse (and supplementary) movement, namely that of phenomenalizing (" transcendentalizing ") nature.

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Journal of Critical Realism, 2017

In this article, I assess Tuukka Kaidesoja's response to my objections to his critique of transcendental arguments and respond to his criticisms of my work. Initially, I respond to some miscellaneous issues that he raises. I then argue that his new attempt to link transcendental arguments to Kant's transcendental idealism is just as question-begging as his previous attempt, and that his problematization of Bhaskar's use of Kantian terminology is premised upon a confusion. I elaborate and defend my conception of transcendental arguments against Kaidesoja's charges of inconsistency, and highlight the roles that necessary conditions and reductio ad absurdum arguments play within transcendental analysis. I also defend the notion of relative a priority against Kaidesoja's criticism of it, contending that his elaboration of explanatory necessity still fails to clearly distinguish it from transcendental necessity. Whilst I concede the validity of his concerns about the starting point of Bhaskar's transcendental analysis of experimental activity, I nevertheless maintain that this does not undermine naturalized transcendentalism itself. I conclude that Kaidesoja's metaphilosophical naturalism is premised upon a flawed critique of transcendentalism and an insufficiently motivated alternative approach.

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