The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  19. This comparison will be all the more important as Simon, Nobel laureate in economics, is recognized as a concrete, practical writer.

  20. Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions in the theory of organizations. His protean oeuvre goes beyond this narrow domain.

  21. On this comparison, as well as for an evocation of Herbert Simon’s considerable oeuvre, see Demailly and Le Moigne, Sciences de l’intelligence.

  22. Simon, Reason in Human Affairs, vii (emphasis added).

  23. Simon, “Rationality in Political Behavior,” 45.

  24. Ibid., 45–46.

  25. There are defenders of this theory who themselves speak of “their hypotheses’ unreality.” Nevertheless, for their axiomatic systems to work, they must posit individuals’ perfect rationality—that is, complete knowledge—and that they will thereby choose the best world. This is quite precisely the Leibnizian God.

  26. Simon, “From Substantive to Procedural Rationality,” 132.

  27. Ibid., 142.

  28. Simon, Administrative Behavior, 101.

  29. The word “satisficing” is a neologism that Simon created: “Since there did not seem to be any word in English for decision methods that look for good or satisfactory solutions instead of optimal ones, some years ago I introduced the term ‘satisficing’ to refer to such procedures” (Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 119).

  30. Ibid., 22.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Simon, “Unity of the Arts and Sciences,” 32.

  33. Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 98.

  34. Boyer, “La rationalité simonienne est-elle satisfaisante?” 165.

  35. Searle,Minds, Brains and Science, 29.

  36. Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 109 (emphasis added).

  37. I allow myself this highly paradoxical phrase because of my earlier discussion of this kind of proof from an observation or a discovery to come.

  38. Chauviré, “Pourquoi moraliser les normes cognitives?”

  39. All these developments are built upon Claude Parthenay’s analyses, one part of which is an exploration of the possible applications of transcendental argument to the economic field. Clearly, I would not have been able to draw these insights about economic thought without his work, in particular his innovative doctoral thesis (“Théorie de la firme”), but also his articles, especially his study of Herbert Simon, “Comportement des agents.”

  8. Beyond the Death of Philosophy

  1. I say nothing of the skeptics, who by definition deny any a priori principle.

  2. A type of reasoning privileged by mathematicians, thematized by Descartes and Wolff as deduction.

  3. An argumentative procedure dear to empiricists.

  4. A reasoning that Aristotle sometimes recommended.

  5. Kant, of course, or even the upward climb of dialectic in Plato.

  6. Recommended by Leibniz and taken up again by the logicians at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  7. All the cognitive sciences, as well as parts of neurology, belong to these human sciences in that they necessarily employ self-referentiality.

  8. Putnam, “Les Voies de la raison,” 54–55. [The quotation is from a question that Bouchindhomme poses to Putnam.]

  9. I can only christen a ship or open a meeting as a function of a given contingent—social—position. An utterance’s success is thus, in the pragmatic functioning of a changing “context,” by definition not necessary.

  10. Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131.

  11. Ibid.

  9. The “Race to Reference”

  1. Benoist, Représentations sans objet, 6.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid., 9.

  4. Ibid., 6–7.

  5. Benoist always treats Husserl’s transcendental “turn” harshly. After having spoken of the “crushing” of different modalities of intentionality that would be induced by this “turn” (ibid., 12n1), he contrasts a phenomenology freed of prejudices to “transcendental phenomenology” (ibid., 15n1). The desire to dismiss the transcendental problematic in order to make twentieth-century philosophy merely a debate between two realisms (that of the Logical Investigations and that of analytic philosophy) is obvious in all his analyses. In this, Benoist is quite close to the tendency in current analytic philosophy to definitively eradicate any reference, even historical, to any transcendental problematic (investigation into the conditions of possibility of a fact, a discipline, a discourse, a language game, etc.). Husserl is retained only insofar as he shares certain presuppositions with analytic philosophy—as soon as he distances himself from them in favor of the transcendental, he is appraised in negative terms (“crushing,” “wasting his time in turning towards himself,” etc.). I cannot agree with this reproduction of the origins of contemporary philosophy. Transcendental philosophy cannot be thus ousted from the “inaugural formation” of twentieth-century philosophy. However much Quine, and later all contemporary American philosophy, may have desired to “naturalize the transcendental,” we cannot consider the transcendental current to be of no importance in the establishment of either of the two paradigms—phenomenological or analytic—nor can we thus erase the history of the last two centuries of European philosophy.

  6. Lask, Logic of Philosophy (Gesammelte Schriften, 2:210ff.). See, on this point, Dastur, “La problématique catégoriale.” It is clearly not an accident that Lask dedicated his dissertation to Fichte. Unfortunately, he was unable to follow the paths that he had mapped out because he was killed on the front in 1915.

  7. I will give only one example as an indication. Pierre Wagner has edited a quite remarkable volume, Les philosophes et la science. This collection, which establishes a high bar with the subtlety and depth of its analyses, reviews the important figures who have marked the relation between philosophy and science. And yet one can only be astounded to realize the pure and simple absence of any mention of Helmholtz, who was not only the last philosopher who was also authentically a scientist—as he illustrated in different disciplines, including the physiology of perception—but was also the one who specified philosophy as a “theory of knowledge,” and, finally, who (de facto and before anybody else) “naturalized” the “transcendental.”

  8. It is thus out of the question for me to claim to bring anything to the study of Heidegger. I will not even consider his doctrine (as I have done for Levinas’s, Rorty’s, or Quine’s) in a meticulous way, in order to test its coherence on a particular theme, the end of philosophy. For Heidegger, my task is much more restricted—to discover the orientation of his line of questioning. As I cannot take up the entirety of his work, I will study this orientation in his reading of Kant, still more precisely the reading in his Kantbuch [Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]. My question about Heidegger is thus strictly the following: is the questioning by which he glorifies Kant in the Kantbuch absolutely incommensurable with what Cohen attributes to Kant? I mean to be read only in the light of this specific question and in relation to my general perspective—not at all from a supposed reading or evaluation of Heidegger’s oeuvre (which I have no intention of making here).

  10. The Tension Between Reference and Self-reference in the Kantian System

  1. Kant, What Real Progress Has Been Made in Germany, 151.

  2. Kant writes, “The genus is representation in general (repraesentatio). Subordinate to it stands representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation (sensatio), an objective perception is knowledge (cognitio)” (Critique of Pure Reason, 314 [A320]).

  3. Ibid., 130 (A97).

  4. Ibid., 161–62 (B146).

  5. On this well-known thesis that critique is exclusively “a theory of representation,” see, for example, Michel Henry and Rudolf Bernet, but also—without any critical intent but purely out of concern for elucidation—André de Muralt, or—this time for his glorification of Kant—Alexis Philonenko, followed by Alain Renaut and Luc Fe
rry. This interpretation of Kantianism as a theory of representation is presented (and, as can be seen, evaluated) in various ways. That is why I am carefully specifying how Kant uses the term. I will do the same for reflection, and then, having completed this elucidation of the two terms in the Critique, I will be able to show how the term “intellectual representation” expresses, through its own contradiction, the impossible synthesis of these two orientations in Kantianism.

  6. Fichte, “Eignen Meditationen über Elementarphilosophie.” [Thomas-Fogiel has translated this text into French.]

  7. Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 3.

  8. Ibid., 7.

  9. In Critique de la représentation, I have extensively developed this view of representation as depiction through schematization in Kant. I showed the different stages of the establishment of this synonymy between representation and depiction, and Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s, Fichte’s, and Salomon Maimon’s critiques of this thesis. I am thus summarizing here what is demonstrated elsewhere. However that may be, this thesis can be expressed quite clearly: in Kant, the valid object (the phenomenon) is the product of the application of a concept to an intuition through the imagination, which, to do so, produces a depiction, not an image. Valid representation is this process of depiction; a valid object is the result of this process.

  10. On the subservience of algebra and arithmetic to geometry in Kant, see Vuillemin, L’intuitionnisme de Kant.

  11. Before Vuillemin, Ernst Cassirer had extensively commented on this subordination of algebra to geometry. Certainly, one could say that this is explained by the fact that Kant was primarily interested in the problems of physics, but that does not suffice to explain the subordination, because Leibniz was also interested in physics’ problems but nevertheless prioritized algebra. Following Cassirer’s example in The Problem of Knowledge, I think that the reversal is not uniquely a historical moment situated at the end of the nineteenth century but rather a thesis maintained much earlier as a function of a theory of knowledge.

  12. There are different ways of interpreting Kant here: either Kant is read as Descartes’ heir (as does Marc Lachièze-Rey), or (with Michel Henry as well as Michel Meyer) he is interpreted as the “liquidator” of subjectivity.

  13. Kant, Lectures on Logic, 591 (emphasis in original).

  14. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 276–77 (A261/B317).

  15. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II, chap. XXVII, sect.11; 1:449.

  16. Leibniz, “Principles of Nature and Grace,” 208.

  17. On this point see my analysis in Critique de la représentation.

  18. Kreis, Phänomenologie und Kritizismus.

  19. Fink, “Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl.”

  20. Ricoeur, “Kant and Husserl.”

  21. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences.

  22. Ricoeur, “Kant and Husserl,” 176.

  23. Guillermit, L’élucidation critique, 167.

  24. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §42, 166.

  25. Ibid., §41, 163.

  26. Kant writes, “For it must be observed, that when I have called the proposition, ‘I think’, an empirical proposition, I do not mean to say thereby, that the ‘I’ in this proposition is an empirical representation. On the contrary, it is purely intellectual, because belonging to thought in general” (Critique of Pure Reason, 378 [B423]).

  27. Immanuel Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” in Correspondence, 283–86. Kant had already employed the term “intellectual” to distinguish arithmetic from geometry in his 1770 inaugural dissertation, “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World,” in Theoretical Philosophy, §12, 390. [The term “intellectuel” is present in the French translation of Kant’s 1770 dissertation (in Œuvres philosophiques, 1:645) but is not in fact present in the English translation. In English, the passage in question is “In addition to these concepts, there is a certain concept which in itself, indeed, belongs to the understanding . . .” The English phrase “belongs to the understanding” corresponds to the French “intellectuel.” In the original Latin the term is “intellectualis” (Kants Werke, 2:397).]

  28. Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 284–85.

  29. Vuillemin, “Kant aujourd’hui,” 23n29. This article is also reprinted in L’intuitionnisme de Kant.

  30. Kneale and Kneale, Development of Logic, 447: “But it is surely absurd to maintain that we can establish the truth of the equation, 135,664 + 37,863 = 173,527, by calling to our aid an intuition of 173,527 fingers.”

  31. Maimon, “Sur la connaissance symbolique” [“Über symbolische Erkenntnis und philosophische Sprache”], 175 [273]: Maimon writes with respect to 100 and 1,000, “Let’s suppose that there are 1,000 soldiers and that I want to lead someone to form the concept of the number 1,000 in telling him that that is how many soldiers are present. He will begin by counting them, but this will not be of any assistance because in the end he can form a concept only of the manner of generating the number 1,000 but not of the number itself as an object of intuition.”

  32. Which Kant does not say. When he distinguishes in “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method” between symbolic construction and ostensive construction (Critique of Pure Reason, 579 [A717/B745]), he speaks only of algebra and refuses to include arithmetic therein. But the reinterpretation (both necessary and legitimate) of the genesis of numbers makes necessary the integration of arithmetic into symbolic construction. Which, as it happens, is not contradictory in itself in relation to the whole of the Kantian system—if Kant did not say this, he certainly could have accepted it. But this simply illustrates the difficulty of understanding arithmetic’s status, including accounting for the simplest operations such as 1,000 + 3,000.

  33. Kant, “To August Wilhelm Rehberg, before September 25, 1790,” Correspondence, 356. [He is paraphrasing Rehberg’s own question, on p. 432 of the next citation.]

  34. August Wilhelm Rehberg, “D’August Wilhelm Rehberg, avant le 25 septembre 1790,” in Kant, Correspondance, 433.

  35. Johann August Eberhard was not mistaken in proposing to understand the status of metaphysical notions on the model of mathematical notions. Mathematicians show that certain concepts are necessary, certain reasonings intersubjectively shared, and all this even though we do not have any intuition of these concepts. On this point, see my article “Dogmatisme et criticisme.”

  36. Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 284.

  37. Ibid. (emphasis in original).

  38. Ibid., 285.

  39. Ibid., 284 (emphasis in original).

  40. Recall the Kantian distinction: for practical reason, postulates (immortality of the soul, etc.) designate a “subjective but nevertheless unconditional rational necessity” (Critique of Practical Reason, 9 [Ak. V:11n]), but with respect to theoretical reason these same postulates are only simple hypotheses without apodictic certainty. Arithmetical properties fit into neither the first class (postulates for practical reason) nor the second (hypotheses without knowledge for theoretical reason).

  41. Christian Wolff already defined a postulate as a practical proposition in the sense of a problem to address, a task that contains its solution in the sole fact of its being carried out. See Philosophia Rationalis Sive Logica, II.1:259 (§§268–69).

  42. Kant, “Reflection No. 968,” 591 (2:291).

  43. Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 285.

  44. As Jules Vuillemin writes, summarizing the Kantian theory of arithmetic, numbers “have meaning only insofar as they make it possible to measure a possible object of experience,” or again, “the concept of number, considered in itself or metaphysically as intellectual, inexorably becomes sensible … in being applied to geometry” (“Kant aujourd’hui,” 23n29).

  45. I will insist that the fact that the associative, etc., properties of addition are true propositions for Kant is just as surprising as that
they can appear as syntheses without the intuition. The only solution that could save Kant from developing a concept as improbably incompatible with his thesis of synthetic a priori judgments would indeed be the one proposed by Schultz—to make these propositions simple axioms. But Kant explicitly denies this. For this reason, I cannot follow Gottfried Martin’s fine analysis in Arithmetic and Combinatorics. Concerned to demonstrate the legitimacy of Kant’s arithmetic theory, Martin proposes to understand the principal properties of arithmetic as axioms. In this way, Kant would have been the first to conceive a necessary axiomization of arithmetic. Besides the fact that this analysis goes against Kant’s explicit denial, I must note the following as a supplementary argument: even if Kant would have accepted Schultz’s solution, the problem still would not at all have been solved. Indeed, this axiomatization orients the theory of arithmetic in a direction completely incompatible with Kantian theory. We would indeed have the following structure: arithmetic starts from hypotheses that must be admitted and cannot be grounded—its other propositions are deduced from these initial hypotheses. And yet, Kantianism cannot allow itself to say that mathematics is a hypothetico-deductive system without having to reconsider the Critique of Pure Reason’s theory of mathematics.

  46. Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 284, 285 (emphasis added in the second passage).

  47. As Jules Vuillemin writes, “However it may be settled, Kantian intuitionism is nonetheless not exempt from impurities. They stem from two kinds of subordination to which Kant subjects numbers and arithmetic” (“Kant aujourd’hui,” 22). The two kinds of subordination are geometry and physics.

  48. See Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis.

  49. On this point, Henry writes, “Kant takes the metaphysics of representivity to the limit, to that extreme point where claiming ultimately to found itself, to subordinate its own condition to representation, it falls into the abyss and self-destructs” (ibid., 124).

  50. Ibid., 123. On this paradoxical use of the term “intellectual” with respect to the “I think,” see also my introductory “Présentation,” 27.