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21/04/2016
Amogha Sahu
21/04/2016
inability to accommodate in three ways:(i) The view from nowhere typically takes as the nature of the world of
objects (which it has taken to be primitive) as a world governed by the
natural sciences, and the natural sciences cannot accommodate
intentionality, as the emphasis on locality and efficacy underwrites the
essentially non-local, non-effective relation present in intentional mental
states.
(ii) The Heideggerian claim that traditional realism restricts itself to a
single way of Being, which is the being of present-of-hand entities,
which appear to us to be separate and detached from our intentional
activities. Having begun with objects (understood in this restrictive way),
one can no longer reconstruct subjects, except as a kind of object (a
Cartesian thinking substance, an Aristotelian rational animal, a
Leibnizian super-monad, a Spinozistic mode and so on). However, we still
recognize the distinctiveness of mentality, and attempts to do justice to it
lead us to untenable metaphysical positions, such as idealism (the mind is
the only object) and dualism (there are two fundamentally different kinds
of objects, mental things and physical things).
(iii) The Kantian claim that traditional metaphysics (which he calls
transcendental realism as opposed to his transcendental idealism)
leads to irreducible antinomies, or contradictions, which can only be
resolved by adopting a new metaphysics, transcendental idealism.
The above should indicate that transcendental metaphysics involves
taking intentionality metaphysically seriously. What it means to take
intentionality metaphysically seriously is to ensure that the intentional
practices of subjects has much more metaphysical pride of place than the
traditional realist metaphysics of objects allows it. This pride of place
can be understood in terms of the Kantian distinction between empirical
and transcendental cognition.
Empirical cognition is concerned with individual objects, or sets or
classes of individual objects. Transcendental cognition is concerned with
what makes those objects possible. In other words, it is concerned with
objecthood, with what it is to even be an object at all. The answer that
both Kant and Heidegger give to the transcendental question (what
makes objects possible?) is that our intentional practices (which Kant
calls transcendental synthesis of the faculty of imagination, and which
Heidegger2 calls comportment or disclosure) generate a domain of
intelligibility, which contains an implicit criterion of objectivity.
2 I will distinguish objects from entities, where the latter is associated with
Heideggers present-at-hand, the detached objects of traditional metaphysics.
2
Amogha Sahu
21/04/2016
Amogha Sahu
21/04/2016
Amogha Sahu
21/04/2016