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2015
On Philosophical Methodology -
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See in particular Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
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I Methodological Preliminaries
One possible way to understand the division between the so-called analytic and
continental philosophical traditions is to depart by understanding them as possible
reactions to the problems raised throughout modern rationalist and empiricist
epistemology, concerning the relation between thought and being. Famously, Richard
Rorty3 proposed to read the birth of the analytic project of semantic analysis as Robert
Brandom calls it4 as a direct sequel to the Kantian rationalist, transcendental project in
linguistic key, thereby continuing the Enlightenment confidence that a theory of
knowledge, now informed by a rigorous understanding of language and meaning, would set
philosophy in the secure path of the sciences5. At heart, the broad genealogy traced by
Rorty hinges on diagnosing a parallel in methodological approaches between the two
philosophical moments: the semantic enquiry into the conditions for meaning and language
proper to the analytic tradition would thus be nothing but an iteration of Kants critical
project to lay the ground for metaphysical enquiry. Accordingly, the violent reactions
against Hegelianism and German Idealism more generally that overtly inspire the
founding work of Moore and Russell would have been inadvertently underwritten by an
unconscious Kantian underbelly, well before Strawson, Carnap and Sellars would try to
recapture Kants legacy within the context of the linguistic turn.
With this said, the alleged complicity between Kant and the analytic tradition is
hardly uncontroversial. In contrast to the genealogy proposed by Rorty, Wilfrid Sellars
famously claimed that analytic philosophy had, if anything, lagged behind the critical turn
initiated by Kant, and had rather remained caught in its Humean phase6. When
characterizing the tradition in this way, Sellars of course had in mind the new wave of
phenomenalist and empiricist theories of mind which, in his estimation, fell prey to the
epistemological naivet of what he attacked under the title of The Myth of the Given. To
bring analytic philosophy to its Kantian phase would mean, first, to take the logical and
Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, 1981.
Brandom, Robert, Between Saying and Doing: Towarda an Analytic Pragmatism, Oxford University Press,
2010.
5 Kant 1933: Bxiv
6 This is an attribution made by Robert Brandom. See Brandom, 2000, 32.
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semantic insights native to the linguistic turn beyond the strictly retrograde assumptions
which lingered in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. In any case, whether one sees
the analytic tradition as continuing an exhausted Kantian rationalist legacy or rather as
lagging in its empiricist phase only to await its eventual critical moment, with Kant in its
future, these characterizations agree in seeing a fateful continuity between the scientific
aspirations of modern epistemology, and the analytic linguistic turn of the 20th Century.
But the post-Kantian Continental philosophical tradition of the 20th Century did not
share a similar optimism and trust in epistemology, however reformed by the New Logic or
the philosophy of language, to set philosophy in the secure path of the sciences. Nor was
the latter ideal conceived as philosophys singular telos. Following Brandom again, we can
say if the incipient analytic tradition by and large continued the enthusiasm with reason
that animated modernity from Descartes to Hegel and beyond, then the Continental
tradition was largely taken by the disillusionment with reason that had emerged in the late
19th Century, with the manifold genealogical critiques of rationality, both local and global,
and whose central names were Marx, Nietzsche and Freud7.
Throughout the 20th Century, the critique of critique that characterizes this
disillusionment would find its home in the various forms of phenomenological,
hermeneutic, and deconstructionist approaches, which followed roughly the genealogical
impetus of their 19th Century predecessors. So the story goes, the exacting methodological
scruples born in Kantian critique and the Enlightenment call to knowledge (sapere aude!)
would soon turn against themselves, once the latent, unexamined core of transcendental
philosophy was revealed as harboring all sorts of metaphysical prejudices, never mind its
aim to lay the ground for metaphysics. Canonically, Heidegger proposes to radicalize
Kants own attempt to ground metaphysical knowledge through a resolutely nonepistemological, but rather existential and pragmatic kind of fundamental ontology, for
Brandom, Robert, Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutic of Magnanimity, available online at
http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/downloads/RGHM%20%2012-11-21%20a.docx
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schematic, three-stage dialectic about the history of scientific and philosophical modernity.
To do this, I accordingly propose to trace three possible readings about the relation
between philosophical and scientific modernity on whose basis we can better assess the
demands for a contemporary philosophy that traverses the disjunction between its analytic
and Continental trajectories. It is precisely the work of Sellars that embodies and
anticipates how this traversal is to be carried out.
For the Continental tradition of the 20th Century however, undermining the
rationalist optimism borne in Kants epoch-grounding declaration, this stipulated
continuity between science and philosophy would result ultimately in a kind of fatal
complicity, or so the story goes. Thus, as we briefly surmised in the first section, the
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hermeneutic scrutiny of the 20th Century post-critical philosophy, waging against the
legacy of the Enlightenment, would systematically establish a thwarted and direct
continuity between the pursuits of modern science and its philosophical counterparts.
According to this narrative, familiar to Heidegger and Adorno, among others, philosophy
and science would share a pernicious, if not dogmatic, obsession with 'knowing', a
restriction of thought to 'cognition', a radical forgetfulness of the fundamental question of
'being', and a blind trust in the powers of calculation leading to technological waywardness,
just to name a few of the evils imputed against the ethos of the Enlightenment.10
The optimist vanguardism with which modernity claimed to position itself in
relation to its past would end up, according to these genealogies, tacitly reifying further
unquestioned dogmas, revealed only in an eventual and violent 'deconstruction' of our
metaphysically laden past, finally moving us to a 'post-modernity' that brings necessary
moderation to the rhetoric of Enlightenment; an awakened historical consciousness that
embraces historical-discursive contingency to its ultimate consequences, and encourages
distrust in the utopia of reason.
(b) The Revisionist View
More recently, however, a 'revisionist' reading of the history of modernity, has
stipulated a radical divorce between its philosophical and scientific sides. Some of its
central proponents include the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, the Iranian
philosopher Reza Negarestani, the English philosopher Nick Land, and others11. It is also,
like the orthodox reading, partially anticipated in the variegated genealogical challenges
that emerge in 19th Century philosophy against Enlightenment rationalism. But according
to this reading, the philosophical transcendental revolution in truth camouflaged the
lingering temptation of a kind of anthropocentric conservatism, already incubated in Kants
idealism. Thus, although Enlightenment rationalism saw it to secularize the objects of
knowledge by delimiting them within the bounds of possible experience, in doing so it
The two canonical texts in this regard remain in my estimation Heideggers The Question Concerning
Technology, and Adorno and Horkheimers The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
11 See in particular Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by
Ray Brassier, Continuum, 2007.
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nevertheless continued to harbor a residual piety in the side of the human subject, whose
transcendental status vis a vis the order of being was said to resist a thoroughbred
naturalization. The exorcizing of all divinity would thus remain incomplete as long as the
agency of the subject, and the Kingdom of Ends as its collateral teleology, is still conceived
in exception to the causal lawfulness of the natural order12.
Refusing the wholesale denunciation of rationality and the cognitive pursuit
towards knowledge, the revisionary history nevertheless sees the philosophical
Enlightenment as failing to aligning speculation to the solemn conquests of the epoch's
scientific revolutions. Thus, while the modern scientific break mainly worked to achieve
the derogation of the theological conception of the world, opening a secular, cosmological
horizon of exploration for thought beyond the safe cohorts of the Earth and the familiarity
of human experience, philosophical modernity, along with its epistemological invention,
served instead as a reactive movement, binding thought to the confines of an 'immobile
Earth' and the strictures of an static transcendental subject. This Ptolemaic counterrevolution with respect to scientific modernity, as the French philosopher Quentin
Meillassoux calls it, far from being called into question by hermeneutic, phenomenological,
or deconstructive wisdom, finds itself further exacerbated through it, subordinating the
cosmological explorations of science to the familiarity of our lifeworld, of 'Dasein's
everydayness, or of culturally configured socio-discursive dimensions13. So, those
proponents of the orthodox reading who diagnose a residual metaphysical baggage in
Kants edifice would have merely intensified the exceptionalism of the human,
subordinating the Natural world explored by the scientific method to the agent who does
not only know but furthermore determines being according to its own capacities.
Kant's attempt to neatly separate the quid juris (or epistemological questions concerning justification) from
the quid facti (the causal-factual questions concerning the lawful relation between natural events) becomes
precarious once the presumed autonomy of the former is evinced as being tacitly determined by the material
efficacy of the latter. As Brandom puts it, "what the genealogists dug down to is not just causes distorting
our reasons, but causes masquerading as reasons.12" However, it is important to remember that the
genealogical challenges to Enlightenment reason also questioned the very notions of facticity and causation
which Brandom incorrectly takes to characterize all genealogical thought.
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This vicious removal of philosophy from science cannot but thus amputate the
powers of the intellect from the amplified navigational horizons set by scientific thought,
where thought appears as the vehicle to think of a reality that reaches well-beyond human
existence or even Life, and where the exceptional being of the homo sapient appears but the
product of a contingency rather than a purposeful fulguration. Bemoaning the ensuing
conservatism of philosophy in relation to the formal and natural sciences, and following
through Meillassoux's revisionary diagnosis to the end, Gabriel Catren proposes a 'true
philosophical modernity', one that would see past the anti-realist configuration of Kantian
transcendental philosophy and the legacy of critique:
"Rather than accepting that a genuine
transcendental revolution is nothing but the angelic
beginning of inhuman terror, even Kant used his
critique to demonstrate that science would never be
able to sublate the humanity of its subjective local
supports... Philosophy will finally be modern only if
it can sublate the critical moment, crush the
Ptolemaic counter-revolution and deepen the
narcissistic wounds inflicted by modern science14.
Catren, Gabriel, Outland Empire, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham
Harman, re. press, 2011.
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One might object that this way of reconstructing the historical period in question conspicuously ignores the
legacy of Wittgenstein, who did as much to raise doubts about the aspirations of the early analytic semantic
project and of logical empiricism, as perhaps Heidegger did with regards to the scientific aspirations of
Husserlian phenomenology. Nevertheless, it remains true that in the long run, this has done little to dissuade
the ensuing vector towards scientific specialization in the field. Thus, Scott Soames, in his two-volume history
of 20th Century analytic thought, seems content in describing Moore and Russell as having done away with the
Hegelian rot, and welcomes the increasing specialization in the discipline as a sign of maturity and progress.
See Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, introduction.
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Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial
Modern Classics, reprint 2008.
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Ibid.
DeVries, Willem, Getting Beyond Idealisms, in Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism:
Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Oxford, 2010, pp. 217.
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This insight lies at the core of Sellars critique of instrumentalist and approaches to
the philosophy of science, and informs his defense of the ontological status of the
theoretical entities postulated by contemporary science, as suitable successor concepts to
the categories of folk-science and our manifest self-understanding. Sellars basic strategy
here, as is well known, consists in reconceiving the distinction between the observable and
the unobservable in epistemic rather than ontological terms: for any entity or posit x to be
observable is for there to be claims concerning x which can acquire the status of perceptual
reports, i.e. non-inferential uses such that they can play the role of language-entry
transitions for a given language. Conversely, theoretical entities are those for which no such
observational uses exist. It follows that the distinction between the observable and what is
unobservable is porous, a feature concerning the use of specific vocabularies and linguistic
tokens, rather than a characterization of the contents or referents postulated by the
vocabularies as such.
So while it might well be true that observational concepts make up the groundlevel, non-inferential reports triggered by sensory experience, this does not mean that
these concepts are either self-justifying states causally acquired from experience, or that
they are beyond revision, i.e. they are not Given in the pejorative sense. Sellars clearly
summarizes this point in Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism19:
[T]o reject the Myth of the Given is not to
commit oneself to the idea that empirical
knowledge as it is now constituted has no rock
bottom level of observation predicates proper. It
is to commit oneself rather to the idea that even if
it does have a rock bottom level, it is still in
principle replaceable by another conceptual
framework in which these predicates do not,
strictly speaking, occur.
Once depurated from its residual piety, the thinking mind finds itself to be just as
problematic with the Nature which it explores, which is to say that knowledge of ourselves,
as beings in the world, is not fundamentally different that knowledge of the worldly objects we
describe in the third person. This holds, again, even if we reckon that, qua sapient beings, we
Sellars, Wilfrid, Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism in Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics and
Epistemology, Ridgeview, 1967.
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must distinguish the functional and normative dimension of conceptual thought before we
understand what it means to make empirical descriptions of what the world happens to be.
This leads us to the next point. From the orthodox reading, I propose that we draw
the following lesson: to dissolve the critical exigency to adjudicate our theses about the
world, threatens to slip right back into dogmatic metaphysics in all its forms. In the last
instance, the 'disintegration' of critique reveals itself, in the name of a 'authentically
modern' stance, as ignoring rather than resolving the epistemological and skeptical
problematic that inspired Kant to propose the critical enquiry into the conditions for
metaphysics. The basic lesson of the great critics and genealogists remains ours: thought
does not have guaranteed access to being (as the idealist thesis of intellectual intuition
would have it), nor is it its unproblematic 'expression' (as the vitalist Bergsonist and
Deleuzean panpsychist thesis would have it). Thought must think of the conditions under
which it can think being, or indeed anything whatsoever. And it is this dimension of
enquiry which, Kant tells us, is not-objective, insofar as to ask about the conditions of
possibility to think of what there exists empirically is not itself to undertake an empirical
investigation into the material structure of the thinker who questions. It is rather asking
what criteria must be met so that any empirical investigation could be carried out, what
must obtain so that empirical knowledge can ever take place. So, with the orthodox history,
we must also accept, however minimally, a 'critical' attitude which curbs our ontological
enthusiasm, and which prevents the idealist conflation of the normative and natural orders.
This principle, together with the lessons drawn from the revisionary history,
provide the basis to understand the twofold ambition proper to the Sellarsian project,
which Jim OShea has helpfully schematized in terms of the causal reducibility cum logical
irreducibility of the manifest image with respect to the scientific image20. That is, the
ambition to reconcile the idea that intelligence is on the one hand something that occurs in
a resolutely material universe, bound by objective laws like everything else, and the idea
that there is a dimension of thought which remains nevertheless not tractable by an
empirical account of its material conditions. Thinking is causally reducible insofar as it is
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only by virtue of being instantiated in material bodies that intelligence can operate. But
thinking is also logically irreducible insofar as it is the concept of the subject as a logical
unit which provides the functional kernel of agency, intelligence and reasoning, and it is
this dimension which can be abstracted and specified irrespective of the material
constraints of the system. Subjectivity is in this functional sense transcendental with
regards to its empirical or material constraints. For to specify what a system ought to do in
order to count as engaging in conceptual thought, that is, how it ought to behave to count as
sapient, again, is not to say anything about what it must be, even if it turns out that the
pragmatic routines implied by intelligence can only occur under very specific material
constraints.
The reconciliation of the normative conception of thinking which depurates Kants
metaphysical overtones, with a naturalism that depurates its Aristotelian overtones in light
of contemporary natural science (as Johanna Seibt and Manuel DeLanda continue to
emphasize) remains one of the most distinct facets of Sellars work, i.e. the attempt to
reconcile transcendental philosophy with a kind of naturalism, thereby interrupting the
anthropocentrism to which the former had been hitherto delivered. In particular, this last
aspect of the Sellarsian project arguably the idea around which his entire work revolves
constitutes the promise for an analytic metaphysics and ontology that is no longer hostage
to the substantialist approaches that would have, in Heideggers eye, made it the
accomplice to the kind of ontotheological prejudices incubated since Plato and Aristotles
equation of being with ousia, passed through the centuries unquestioningly. Gesturing
towards Sellars and Whiteheads visionary approaches in this regard, Johanna Seibt writes:
20th analytical ontology did not succeed in
overcoming the traditional preoccupation with
static entities, despite its scientific orientations
and despite scientific developments (relativity
theory, quantum physics) suggesting the primacy
of processes or events. Since the formal tools of
analytical ontology, such as the predicate calculus,
are standardly interpreted over a domain of
substance-like objects, 20th century ontological
researchwith few exceptions noted belowhas
even reinforced the topical and theoretical bias of
the tradition. Only most recently analytical
ontologists have begun to explore the idea that an
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the Platonist and Aristotelian hypostasis of substance and of essence, in sight of a future
metaphysics within which process and dynamicity are inherent to the thought of being?
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