The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  51. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 378 (B423).

  52. Ibid., 168 (B157).

  53. Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 123.

  54. Dufrenne, La notion d’a priori, 18.

  55. This phrase comes from remarks Hyppolite made in the discussion following a lecture by H. L. van Breda (“La réduction phénoménologique,” 323) but probably was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego (36). For more on the history of this phrase, see Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, 88n91; Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 278n67; and Descombes,Modern French Philosophy, 77n3.—trans.

  56. “Das Es” (literally, “the it”) is Sigmund Freud’s German term for the preconscious seat of the drives, usually translated into English with the Latin term “the id.”—trans.

  57. Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 124.

  58. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 8.—trans.

  59. Helmholtz, “Facts of Perception,” 368. More precisely, Helmholtz writes that “the problems which that earlier period considered fundamental to all science were those of the theory of knowledge: What is true in our sense perceptions and thought? and In what way do our ideas correspond to reality?” (368).

  11. Helmholtz’s Choice as a Choice for Reference: The Naturalization of Critique

  1. Dussort, L’école du Marbourg, 29.

  2. Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach,” 601.

  3. Cassirer, Problem of Knowledge, 4.

  4. Recall that Helmholtz’s first great scientific discovery was the mathematical formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy. It was an entirely “mechanistic,” that is, Newtonian, formulation of a physiological phenomenon. Helmholtz taught physiology, anatomy, and physics; he invented new optical devices [including the ophthalmoscope]; he also distinguished himself in thermodynamics, wrote on numbers and geometry, and outlined at length an epistemology that he proclaimed as Kantian. In a word, he embodied one of the last examples of the “complete scientist.”

  5. Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, 2:20 (§17).

  6. Helmholtz, “Facts of Perception,” 392ff.

  7. Ibid. 390.

  8. In fact, Schlick insisted on the difference between these two authors in order to highlight Helmholtz’s positivism and his having overcome several metaphysical concepts that remained in Kant. The direction of his argument is thus the opposite of my own.

  9. This doctrine of “unconscious inferences” was taken up by Ivan Pavlov—who, moreover, cites Helmholtz as a precursor. This is further evidence of the naturalist character of this reading of Kant.

  10. See Bouveresse, Langage, perception et réalité, 50ff.

  11. Helmholtz, “Facts of Perception,” 383.

  12. Hahn, Carnap, and Neurath, “Scientific Conception of the World,” 334.

  13. On this point, see Planty-Bonjour, “La Critique de la raison pure.”

  14. Buzon, “L’individu et le sujet,” 24–25.

  12. Critique: A Positivist Theory of Knowledge or Existential Ontology?

  1. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I will draw exclusively from this 1929 text and from the Davos discussions of the same period. Recall that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant evolved along with the shifts in his own philosophy. In this 1929 text, Heidegger makes Kant into a foreshadowing of his own philosophy and even claims that Kant went further than Husserl.

  2. Ibid., 7.

  3. Ibid., 4–5. Recall Heidegger’s principal thesis about philosophy and its history: Aristotle’s Metaphysics contains an ambiguity about the definition of the prote philosophia, because philosophy is knowledge of beings qua beings as well as knowledge of the most eminent being, from which the totality of beings can be understood. Scholastic philosophers ignored this duality and reduced Aristotle’s two questions to one: “Western metaphysics after Aristotle owes its development not to the assumption and implementation of a previously existing Aristotelian system, but rather to a lack of understanding concerning the questionable and open nature of the central problems left by Plato and Aristotle” (5). Hence, metaphysics was destined to be only a series of variations on an onto-theological structure.

  4. See the first chapter of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, entitled “The Unfolding of the Idea of a Fundamental Ontology Through the Interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a Laying of the Ground for Metaphysics”; see also Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the introduction, “The Critique of Pure Reason as Laying the Foundation for Metaphysics as Science.”

  5. As Didier Franck has shown, Heidegger’s philosophy systematically depreciates the problem of space to the benefit of the problem of time (Heidegger et le problème de l’espace). The same is true in his interpretation of Kant.

  6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Analytic,” book II, chap. 2, §3.—trans.

  7. Heidegger’s interpretation of Cohen here is, it seems to me, disputable. Cohen does not reestablish or return to a “metaphysical” system in which finitude would be denied or relativized, because understood in terms of an already posited absolute of knowledge. Cohen’s thesis about knowledge is not given as an attempt to reduce finitude compared to an absolute. It is a description of how mathematical knowledge functions.

  8. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 15. The German text [and English translation] is noticeably stronger [than the French translation] because it literally says, “this must be hammered in: knowing is primarily intuiting.” [The French translation literally reads, “this must be constantly remembered.”]

  9. This debate is available in English as “Davos Disputation Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger.”—trans.

  10. Clearly, I must note one significant exception: in Science et métaphysique chez Kant, Michel Meyer relaunches this debate and sees in the two editions the expression of an insurmountable contradiction of Kantianism, even of philosophy as a whole. Meyer also notes how rarefied the question has become today.

  11. He had already done so in 1783 in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. It is not an accident that this text opens with an homage to David Hume.

  12. We probably ought to prefer this more general formulation, rather than simply accusing the subjective deduction of psychologism, because it was the Marburg school that directly associated the “subjective deduction” with “psychologism.” But this association’s directness is historically misleading in that Hegel said the precise opposite: for Hegel, the subjective deduction translated “a reality put forward in overcoming empirical psychology,” while the objective deduction relapses into psychologism, “into this formal or more properly, psychological idealism.” “Its idealistic side—which claims for the subject certain relations, called categories—is nothing but an extension of Locke’s view” (Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 75, 78). The general formulation that I am proposing of the difference between the two editions avoids this ambiguity insofar as everyone accepts the claim that the objective deduction is a description of a mechanism and not a genetic explanation of a product.

  13. Alexis Philonenko vehemently rejects Heidegger’s reading and challenges the interpretation in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in these terms: “Heidegger’s thesis is, it seems, contradictory and unfounded. Indeed, Heidegger unceasingly underscores how in the second edition of the “Transcendental Deduction” Kant makes a point of denying the imagination in the understanding. But—and this point is essential—the transcendental schematism in which according to Heidegger himself primacy is conferred upon the imagination, was not altered in the second edition!” (L’œuvre de Kant, 1:176). The same argument is made by Alain Renaut (Era of the Individual, 187–88). But as Heidegger notes (Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 131ff.), the chapter on the schematism can be read in two ways (as a description of a mechanism or as the unveiling of an origin). The resolution of the debate thus depends on one’s general orienta
tion.

  14. Vleeschauwer, La déduction transcendantale, 3:16n2. Vleeschauwer also addresses the status of this question in his own era (18). See also, for more contemporary commentators, Michel Meyer’s revival of this debate (why is the imagination devalued in the second edition?) in Science et métaphysique chez Kant.

  15. On these differences, see Meyer, Science et métaphysique chez Kant, 170ff., and Vleeschauwer, La déduction transcendantale, vol. 3, part 1, entitled “The Transcendental Deduction in the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.”

  16. Vuillemin, L’héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne, 302.

  17. Meier, “Traits fondamentaux de la critique kantienne,” 236.

  18. Ibid.

  19. This criticism can be found as early as Faith and Knowledge, where Hegel shows that if one is consistent, critical knowledge itself becomes invalid (76ff.). For later criticisms along the same lines, see Stanguennec, Hegel critique de Kant. But in this remarkable text, Stanguennec does not emphasize enough, in my view, the criticisms put forward in terms of the consideration of a discourse’s status.

  20. It is to be noted in passing that this idea of a quantitative finitude is thus “of a forgetting of the ontological difference” and for the seventeenth century itself is subject to caution. In his studies of Descartes, Jean-Luc Marion was able to show how, with the strange thesis of eternal truths, Descartes acknowledged a qualitative difference between our rationality and God’s, and thereby escaped the onto-theological structure.

  21. The end of history is decreed either by an assertion of progress (philosophy is replaced by a more scientific and rigorous discipline, as Austin, for example, would have it when he articulates his desire that philosophy be transformed into linguistics) or by a decline (the onto-theological process has reached its completion, as Heidegger and his successors hold).

  13. Questioning the History of Philosophy

  1. Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131 (emphasis added).

  2. The expression is Alain Renaut’s, made with respect to Kant in Kant aujourd’hui. This is also the position of every hermeneuticist who knows that any return to a tradition is an active reinterpretation and not a passive appropriation.

  3. This is, we know, one of Fichte’s great theses, repeated at the beginning of each Wissenschaftslehre: reading the Wissenschaftslehre is not a matter of appropriating a content or even a method but rather each time of constructing and producing, not repeating and reproducing. It follows that the idea that one could return to Fichte as one could at times return to Kant (for example, in judging that philosophical inquiry had been closed by the philosopher and that the only thing left to do was to apply his insights to fields that Kant had not really studied—politics, society, etc.) literally has no meaning for Fichte, because the truth does not reside in a proposition but in the unceasingly repeated production of rationality as a constant wrenching from naturalness. The Wissenschaftslehre must therefore not be applied, but must be unceasingly produced, or else one is not really dealing with the Wissenschaftslehre.

  4. Barnes, “Aristote chez les anglophones,” 706.

  5. This is the title of one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories in Ficciones.

  6. Linsky, Referring, ix.

  7. As I have shown, neither an assertion of a minimal realism nor a given thesis about the nature of the brain can do without a consideration of self-reference. To put it differently, the problems of reference to the world sometimes fall within a consideration of self-reference. It is because this dimension of self-reference has been concealed that the endless disputes about realism and antirealism have again been able to occupy the philosophical scene. As long as one remains within the orientation of “reference” (as I have shown in my analysis of one of Pascal Engel’s texts), the problem of reference to the world cannot be resolved, nor can the realism/antirealism debate be decided.

  8. Poincaré held the chair of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne from 1886 until his death in 1912; his disciples, who likely would have extended and advanced his work, were thus among the generations decimated in World War I.

  9. Born in 1930, Largeault died in 1995.—trans.

  10. In addition to my earlier citation [chap. 2, n. 5], in which Largeault attacks the way that French practitioners of a global and more or less mythical “analytic philosophy” aim to “put down other philosophers, by invoking precision and rigor” and thus become “a new panacea,” let’s recall a few of Largeault’s phrases in Quine: “Through a disgust with speculative chimeras, or perhaps through foolishness, epistemologists tend to believe that scientific work consists in treating minuscule problems with meticulous care. By definition, this is science! [But] imprecision can be fertile. Theories have been invented with a view of achieving an objective X or because one thought that p. X turns out to be impossible or p false; in compensation one discovers q or attains objectives Y, Z . . . , that are more interesting than X and that had not been suspected. Knowing X and p with precision would have prevented the undertaking” (178n1). Or again: “[They] believe logic is honored through attention to details. Attention to details is a congenital trait of what is done in the name of analytic philosophy” (178). Or again: “Carnap and Popper have become the tokens for a crossbreed of rationalist mandarins and puritans” (185n12). Wittgenstein has “prompted philosophers to see, in reasoning or in expression, only what is mechanical or mechanizable” (185n9). All “the neopositivists should compare themselves to doctors who go to great lengths ‘discussing the treatment for a patient who died yesterday’” [Molière, Hypochondriac, act 3, scene 10, p. 88] (185n16), etc. It is important that these foibles—in which some representatives of the analytic paradigm occasionally fall—were noted by one of the greatest experts in this paradigm, and clearly not by a Continental phenomenologist or a Persian philosopher.

  11. Janicaud died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of sixty-four.—trans.

  12. But however that may be, whichever forking path each of us—as historians of philosophy—will choose to cultivate, nothing in the final analysis could be worse than the situation in which philosophy is declared to be dead, and the history of philosophy to be futile. To the many today who reject the French practice of the history of philosophy in exclaiming, “But why do the history of philosophy!” historians of philosophy can respond, “To avoid making philosophy into what you have made it, that is, a discipline that each day solemnly pronounces its own death, and each morning organizes its own funeral.” In contrast to this brooding about a never-ending death, the history of philosophy can offer the willing and joyful practice of an always-living philosophy.

  13. The two examples are taken from Hilary Putnam. I have already mentioned the first, about “the twin Earth”; the second is drawn from the 1963 article “Brains and Behavior,” an article in which Putnam elaborates his “functionalist” theory.

  14. Putnam, “Philosophie analytique et philosophie continentale.”

  15. Ibid., 48.

  16. I say “perhaps” because a thought experiment could fail but one would not know it until it had been carried through to completion.

  17. Thomas-Fogiel, “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique.”

  18. See Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?”—trans.

  19. We can see here how doing an interpretation “in return” is not a “return to” but rather an intersection of questions.

  20. On this general term and the constellation that it encompasses, see chap. 1 and especially Fisette and Poirier, Philosophie de l’esprit, to which I made frequent reference.

  21. See chap. 1, where I have approached this problem from a different angle. I take the minimal thesis of parallelism and not causalism because, as we have seen, the latter is not unanimously shared among neurobiologists themselves.

  22. Both were contemporaries of Descartes’.—trans.

  23. I choose this example as it seems to have a certain consonance with some current neurologica
l alternatives.

  24. It is clear that these few very rapid suggestions are only sketches of an analytical orientation to illustrate (with examples other than Fichte or Hegel, already taken up in this book) what a well-ordered dialogue between philosophers of different times could mean. The philosophy of mind summons Descartes as a foil, it is thus natural to make him participate in the debates, and, by putting oneself in his place, to understand what the philosophy of mind really contributes.

  25. This is the Churchlands’ program that I’ve already mentioned.

  Conclusion

  1. Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131.

  2. With the clear exception of Karl-Otto Apel, analysis of whom made possible the transition to part 2.

  3. We have seen throughout this text that “to ground” means nothing other than “giving arguments or justifications with a view to demonstrating x or y.” That this term has become what Martial Guéroult called a “slanderous” term does not stop me from claiming it.

  4. See the first section of chap. 7, “A New Definition of Transcendental Argument.”

  5. Kant, like very few other philosophers—Aristotle, certainly; Descartes, without any doubt—is a “civilization maker,” in the sense that, for centuries, the most diverse thinkers and the most directly opposed trends remain dependent upon the way of thinking that he inaugurated.