Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. A Sketch of Kant’s Critical Philosophy

2.1 What the Critical Philosophy Is

2.2 Kant’s Metaphysics

2.3 Kant’s Ethics

3. Neo-Kantian Openings

3.1 What Neo-Kantianism Is

3.2 Neo-Kantianism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy

4. Kantian Themes in the Early Phenomenological Tradition

4.1 Kant, Brentano, and the Foundations of Phenomenology

4.2 Kant, Husserl, Phenomenology, and Philosophical Logic

4.3 Kant, Husserl, and Transcendental Phenomenology

4.4 Kant, Heidegger, and the Analytic of Dasein

5. Kantian Themes in the Early Analytic Tradition

5.1 What Analytic Philosophy Is

5.2 Kant, Moore, and the Nature of Judgment

5.3 Kant, Russell, and Logicism

5.4 Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Tractatus

5.5 Kant, Carnap, and Logical Positivism

6. A Parting of the Ways? Kant, the Davos Conference, and the Great Divide

7. Kantian Themes in the Middle and Later Analytic Tradition

7.1 Kant, Quine, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

7.2 Kant, Strawson, and Transcendental Arguments

7.3 The End of the A Priori: Kant, Sellars, and Scientific Naturalism

8. Kantian Themes in the Middle and Later Phenomenological Tradition

8.1 Kant, Husserl, and the Crisis of European Sciences

8.2 The End of Phenomenology: Kant, Derrida, and Deconstructionism

9. Kantian Themes in Ethics

9.1 Kant, Moore Again, and the Naturalistic Fallacy

9.2 Kantian Ethics after Rawls

10. Conclusion
 
 

1. Introduction

A.N. Whitehead quotably wrote in 1929 that "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The same could be said, perhaps with even greater accuracy, of the 20^th century Euro-American philosophical tradition and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In this sense the 20^th century was the post-Kantian century.

Twentieth century philosophy in Europe and the USA was dominated by two distinctive and (after 1945) officially opposed traditions: the analytic tradition and the phenomenological tradition. Very simply put, the analytic tradition was all about logic and analyticity, and the phenomenological tradition was all about consciousness and intentionality. Ironically enough however, despite their official Great Divide, both the analytic and the phenomenological traditions were essentially continuous and parallel critical developments from an earlier dominant neo-Kantian tradition that by the end of the 19^th century had vigorously re-asserted the claims of Kant’s transcendental idealism against Hegel’s absolute idealism and the other major systems of post-Kantian German idealism, under the unifying slogan "Back to Kant!" So again ironically enough, both the analytic and phenomenological traditions were alike founded on, and natural outgrowths from, Kant’s Critical Philosophy.

By the end of the 20^th century however, and this time sadly rather than ironically, both the analytic and phenomenological traditions had not only explicitly rejected their own Kantian foundations and roots but also had effectively undermined themselves philosophically, even if by no means institutionally: the analytic tradition on the one hand by abandoning its basic methodological conception of analysis as the process of logically decomposing propositions into conceptual or metaphysical "simples," as the necessary preliminary to a logical reconstruction of the same propositions, and by also jettisoning the corresponding idea of a sharp, exhaustive, and significant "analytic-synthetic" distinction; and the phenomenological tradition on the other hand by abandoning its basic methodological conception of phenomenology as "seeing essences" with a priori certainty under a "transcendental-phenomenological reduction," and by also jettisoning the corresponding idea of a "transcendental ego" as the metaphysical ground of consciousness and intentionality.

One way of interpreting these sad facts is to say that just insofar as analytic philosophy and phenomenology alienated themselves from their Kantian origins, they stultified themselves. This is the first unifying thought behind this chapter, and it is a downbeat one. The second unifying thought, which however is contrastively upbeat, is that both the analytic and phenomenological traditions, now in conjunction instead of opposition, could rationally renew themselves in the 21^st century by critically recovering their Kantian origins and by seriously re-thinking and re-building their foundations in the light of this critical recovery. Or in other words: Forward to Kant.

2. A Sketch of Kant’s Critical Philosophy

2.1 What the Critical Philosophy Is

Not surprisingly, Kant’s Critical Philosophy is to be found primarily in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). But the Critical Philosophy is not exhausted by the Critiques. Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), and Jäsche Logic (1800) all complement and supplement the first Critique; his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals ( 1785), Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797), similarly complement and supplement the second Critique; and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) and the unfinished and posthumously published Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics (also known as the Opus postumum) together make up his final Critical reflections on human reason and physical nature.

But what is the Critical Philosophy? In a word, it’s all aboutus. Less telegraphically put, the Critical Philosophy is a comprehensive theory of human nature, carried out by means of detailed analyses of human "cognition" (Erkenntnis), human volition or "the power of choice" (Willkür), and human "reason" (Vernunft). Cognition, volition, and reason are all "faculties" (Vermögen), which in turn are innate, spontaneous mental "capacities" (Fähigkeiten) or "powers" (Kräfte). The innateness of a mental capacity means that the capacity is intrinsic to the mind, and not the acquired result of experiences, habituation, or learning. Correspondingly, the spontaneity of a mental capacity implies that the acts or operations of the capacity are

What makes the Critical Philosophy a specifically critical philosophy however, is Kant’s striking and substantive thesis--which amounts to a mitigated form of rationalism

--to the effect that the human faculty of reason, whether theoretical or practical, is inherently constrained by the brute fact of human finitude, or our animality. Otherwise put, Kantian critique is the philosophical story of how our reason, which initially aims to occupy the standpoint of God through theoretical speculation and practical aspiration alone, rationally reconciles itself to cognitive and moral life in a messy material world. More precisely, this is to say that our capacity of reason finds itself inherently constrained by the special contingent conditions of all human animal embodiment: the faculties of "sensibility" (Sinnlichkeit), and "desire" (Begehren) or "drive" (Trieb). In what ways constrained? The answer is that human sensibility strictly limits our theoretical reason to the cognition of sensory appearances or phenomena, and that human desire or drive strictly limits our practical reason to choices that are bound up with our psychophysical and psychosocial well-being, or "happiness" (Glückseligkeit). So rational creatures like us are nevertheless inherently human, and indeed all-too-human:

2. Kant’s Metaphysics

(1) The transcendentalism thesis says that all the representational contents of cognition are strictly determined in their underlying forms or structures by a set of primitive or underived universal a priori innate spontaneous human cognitive capacities, also known as "cognitive faculties" (Erkenntnisvermögen). These cognitive faculties include (i) the "sensibility" (Sinnlichkeit), or the capacity for spatial and temporal representation via sensory "intuition" (Anschauung)(CPR A22/B36), (ii) the "understanding" (Verstand), or the capacity for conceptualization or "thinking "(Denken) (CPR A51/B75), (iii) the power of "imagination" (Einbildungskraft), which on the one hand comprehends the specific powers of "memory" (Gedächtnis, Erinnerung) (A 7: 182-185), "imaging" (Bildung), and "schematizing" (CPR A137-142/B176-181), but also on the other hand includes the synthesizing or mental-processing power of the mind more generally (CPR A78/B103), (iv) "self-consciousness" (Selbstbewußtsein) (CPR B132) or the capacity for "apperception," which is the ground of unity for all conceptualizing and judging (CPR B406), and finally (v) reason, which as we have already seen is the capacity for logical inference and practical decision-making. The whole system of cognitive capacities is constrained in its operations by both "pure general logic," the topic-neutral or ontically uncommitted, a priori, universal, and categorically normative science of the laws of thought, and also by "transcendental logic," which is pure general logic that is semantically and modally restricted by an explicit ontic commitment to the proper objects of human cognition (CPR A50-57/B74-82).

(2) The idealism thesis says that the proper objects of human cognition are nothing but objects of our sensory experience--appearances or phenomena--and not things-in-themselves or noumena, owing to fact that space and time are nothing but necessary a priori subjective forms of sensory intuition (Kant calls this "the ideality of space and time"), together with the assumption (which I will call the intrinsicness of space and time) that space and time are intrinsic relational properties of every object in space and time (CPR A19-49/B33-73, A369 and P 4: 293) Appearances, in turn, are token-identical with the intersubjectively communicable contents of sensory or experiential representations (PC 11: 314). Correspondingly, the essential forms or structures of the appearances are type-identical with the representational forms or structures that are generated by our universal a priori mental faculties: "objects must conform (richten) to our cognition" (CPR Bxvi), and "the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition" (CPR Bxvii).

Putting transcendentalism and idealism together, we now have the complex conjunctive Kantian metaphysical thesis of transcendental idealism:

But what is the point of transcendental idealism? Kant’s immensely brilliant answer, worked out in rich (and occasionally stupefying) detail in the Critique of Pure Reason, is that transcendental idealism alone adequately explains how synthetic a priori propositions--that is, non-logically necessary, substantively meaningful, experience-independent truths--are semantically possible or objectively valid (CPR B19), and also how human freedom of the will is both logically and metaphysically possible (CPR Bxxv-xxx, A530-558/559-586). His two-part thought in a nutshell is this:

1. the synthetic apriority thesis, which says that all and only empirically meaningful

This shows us that the ultimate upshot of Kant’s metaphysics is thoroughly anthropocentric and practical. Otherwise put, Kant fully rejects scientific or reductive naturalism, which says that science--more precisely, exact science, or mathematics-plus-physics--is, as Wilfrid Sellars famously formulates it, "the measure of all things." On the contrary, for Kant scientific reductionism leads directly to both epistemic and moral skepticism (CPR xxix). Moreover, by a fundamental explanatory inversion or "Copernican Revolution," for Kant exact science is grounded on the transcendental metaphysics of rational human nature. But it gets even better than this. In order to allow for the possibility of human freedom, he also holds that we must sharply limit the epistemic and metaphysical scope of exact science: "I have therefore found it necessary to deny scientific knowing (Wissen) in order to make room for [moral] faith (Glauben)" (CPR Bxxx). Indeed, practical reason has both explanatory and ontological priority over theoretical reason (CPrR 5: 120-121). So, perhaps surprisingly, the key to Kant’s metaphysics is his ethics.

2. Kant’s Ethics

The moral law, or Categorical Imperative--that is, an unconditional universal rational command--is our duty or strict obligation as rational animal beings or persons, and says that we ought to do only those acts whose "maxims" or act-intentions (i) can be consistently universalized, (ii) always involve treating other persons as "ends-in-themselves," or as having intrinsic value, and never merely as means to the satisfaction of our own desires, (iii) inherently express our pure rational volitional nature as free or causally spontaneous and also autonomous or self-legislating agents, and

(iv) directly imply our belonging to an indefinitely large ideal community of persons and free and autonomous agents, "the kingdom of ends," the card-carrying members of which can self-legislate the moral law only insofar as they also legislate for every other member of the self-same ideal moral community (GMM 4: 406-445).

Now according to Kant the Categorical Imperative provides a universal unconditional non-instrumental reason for human action (as specified in particular unconditional non-instrumental reasons, constructed by us in particular act-contexts) in the form of a rational command, and is to be is to be sharply contrasted with hypothetical imperatives either of "skill" or "prudence," which are conditional instrumental rational commands and thereby provide conditional instrumental reasons for human action: such as that I ought to flip the light switch in order to turn on the light (imperative of skill), or that I ought to bring the glass up to my lips if want to drink my tot of Jack Daniel’s (imperative of prudence). But the Categorical Imperative, in and of itself, does not tell us which maxims or act-intentions to form but rather but rather only how we must form maxims in order to be morally good. So the Categorical Imperative is a purely procedural or constructive principle of human volition and action (exactly analogous to the Law of Non-Contradiction in relation to the truth of theoretical judgments and the soundness of arguments), and not a substantive or material principle that in and of itself yields maxims. This means that practical reasoning must always begin with actual human desires and hypothetical imperatives as inputs or data, and then, if the moral law is to be heeded, suitably constrain intentional animal action by choosing to act only on those maxims that satisfy the four formulations of the Categorical Imperative. The recognition of our obligation and ability to constrain intentional animal action appropriately, when concretely realized and non-cognitively consciously experienced via some characteristically moral feelings such as self-respect, self-denying concern for others, moral disgust, or righteous anger, is what Kant calls the "Fact of Reason" (Faktum der Vernunft) (CPrR 5: 31). Most crucially, the Fact of Reason yields direct affective, nonconceptual, and non-propositional (hence non-cognitive, non-scientific, and non-theoretical) compelling empirical evidence for the actual existence of transcendental freedom and practical freedom (CPR A802/B830).

So, unlike empirically meaningful human cognition, which can never even in principle transcend the bounds of sensibility (CPR A42-43/B59-60), the rational human animal still does possess the capacity for practical freedom or autonomy, which is a spontaneous causally efficacious capacity for self-legislative choosing in a way that is underdetermined by all alien causes and prudential concerns, and in self-conscious conformity with the Categorical Imperative (CPrR 5: 28-33). In other words, autonomy is rational freedom of the pure "will" (Wille) (MM 6: 213-214). No matter how infrequent such choices are, to exercise rational freedom of the will is to realize the rational practical aspect of our human nature, and to that extent, transcend the intrinsic constraints on human volition, or our animality. So, paradoxically, we rationally transcend ourselves only when we fully come to terms with our animality. Via the Fact of Reason, we are immediately conscious of the fact that autonomy or practical freedom of the will actually exists, because (a) freedom of the will is (as an online capacity) a necessary and (as an implemented capacity) sufficient condition of moral responsibility, and (b) rational human animals are, as a social matter of fact, held morally responsible for their right and wrong intentional actions alike (GMM 4: 446-463). Or more succinctly put: the ought and ought not of morality alike entail the can of rational volitional human agency, or the autonomously and practically free will.

This power of autonomy is to be sharply contrasted with the "power of choice" (Willkür) (CPR A802/B830 and CPrR 5: 97), shared by human animals and non-human animals alike, which is not necessarily autonomous and therefore has no sufficient connection with moral responsibility. Yet, whenever the power of choice is realized in a rational animal, this implies at least a transcendentally free causal responsibility and thus remains a necessary condition of autonomy and moral responsibility. No rational human animal can be practically free and operate independently of all alien causes and sensuous motivations unless it can also, just like any other conscious animal, move itself by means of its desires in a way that is strictly underdetermined by the universal mechanism of the causal laws of inert material nature--or in other words, move itself animately, purposefully, and freely. And in this way, according to Kant, the inertial causal dynamics of mechanical matter is radically extended by the vital causal dynamics of embodied moral persons.

3. Neo-Kantian Openings

3.1 What Neo-Kantianism Is

Neo-Kantianism in all its forms was a German philosophical movement that ran its course from roughly 1870 to roughly 1945. It consisted in the close study and passionate promulgation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy plus some editorial changes and critical updates, whereby certain troublesome concepts and doctrines (for example, things-in-themselves and their metaphysical status) were omitted or finessed, and whereby certain themes (for example, Kant’s psychology, his idealism, or his philosophy of the exact sciences) were specially emphasized and further developed. The unifying slogan "Back to Kant!" was the motto of Otto Liebmann’s Kant und die Epigonen (1865). Other leading neo-Kantians included Alois Riehl, Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Heinrich Rickert, and Ernst Cassirer.

3.2 Neo-Kantianism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy

Neo-Kantianism carried over into the early 20^th century in three significantly different versions: (1) a science-oriented neo-Kantianism (mainly centered in Marburg) that was fueled by contemporary developments in the exact sciences, together with classical empiricism in the tradition of David Hume and J.S. Mill, (2) a psychologistic neo-Kantianism (mainly centered in Göttingen) that reacted against science-oriented neo-Kantianism and fused with empirical psychology, and (3) an idealistic neo-Kantianism (mainly centered in Heidelberg) that merged with elements of the dominant Hegelian tradition. Psychologistic neo-Kantianism led to phenomenology. Idealistic neo-Kantianism led to neo-Hegelianism. And science-oriented neo-Kantianism led to logical positivism.

By the end of the 20^th century, analytic philosophy comfortably dominated the Anglo-American philosophical scene, and analytic philosophers were the Establishment. But at the beginning of the century things were very different: the dominant philosophies in English-speaking countries and Europe alike were neo-Kantianism or neo-Hegelianism, and analytic philosophers were the Young Turks. Analytic philosophy emerged in the period from the fin de siècle to the mid-1930s by means of, on the one hand, a sharp reaction against neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, which pulled it in the direction of platonism and radical realism, and on the other hand, the anti-metaphysical impetus provided by logical positivism, which, rather confusingly, also pulled analytic philosophy simultaneously in the opposite direction of conventionalism and anti-realism. This inner conflict in the foundations of analytic philosophy between platonism and realism on the one side, and conventionalism and anti-realism on the other, later worked itself out in the historical-philosophical careers of the paired concepts of the analytic proposition (a necessary a priori truth by virtue of logical laws and logical definitions--or perhaps "meanings"--alone) and analysis (the process of knowing an analytic proposition). There will be more to say about these important notions in sections 5 and 7 below. The crucial point at the moment is that they make sense only in relation to a neo-Kantian and thereby Kantian backdrop. Without Kant’s Critical Philosophy, there would have been no such thing as analytic philosophy.

Now back to exploring the influence of psychologistic neo-Kantianism, and the emergence of phenomenology.

4. Kantian Themes in the Early Phenomenological Tradition

4.1 Kant, Brentano, and the Foundations of Phenomenology

Phenomenology, according to its founder Franz Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standoint (1874), is "descriptive psychology." This contrastively refers back to Kant’s Paralogisms, where he thoroughly criticizes rational psychology, which claims that the mind is a simple substantial immortal Cartesian soul, or a subjective thing-in-itself (CPR 341-405/B399-432). In other words, rational psychology is the a priori science of mental noumena. By sharp contrast, descriptive psychology in Brentano’s sense is the a posteriori science of mental phenomena. Brentano’s mental phenomena are essentially the same as the contents of what Kant called "inner sense," and what William James later called "the stream of consciousness" or "stream of thought." More precisely, mental phenomena are occurrent apparent facts about the human activity of consciously representing objects, which Brentano dubbed (following the Scholastics) intentionality. Intentionality is a necessary and sufficient condition of mental phenomena. Another necessary and sufficient condition of mental phenomena is inner perception, which is an immediate, infallible, self-evident knowledge about intentional facts. Brentano’s notion of inner perception in turn corresponds to what Kant called "empirical apperception" (CPR B132), with the crucial difference that unlike Brentano he does not suppose that empirical apperception is either immediate (because for Kant it is always mediated by concepts), infallible (because for Kant it is merely contingent cognition), or certain (because for Kant it is merely empirical cognition).

According to Brentano, every act of intentionality--every mental phenomenon--has an intentional object or "immanent objectivity." Intentional objects in turn have the ontological property of "inexistence" or existence-in, which means that their being necessarily depends on the being of the act of intentionality itself. So for Brentano the act of intentionality literally contains its intentional objects as intrinsic contents. Consequently, an intentional object cannot also exist outside the mind, as a thing-in-itself. It is therefore equivalent to what Kant called an "appearance" (Erscheinung). When an intentional object is represented spatially or by means of what Kant called "outer sense," whether or not it is presented as actually extended in space (as, for example, in the case of the visual experience of color, which sometimes is directed proximally to phosphenes--the tiny phenomenal fireworks you experience when you close your eyes and press your fingers on your eyelids--and not distally to colored surfaces), then it is what Brentano calls a "physical phenomenon."

Brentano’s notion of phenomenology is therefore, with one crucial exception, the same as Kant’s notion of empirical psychology, The crucial exception is that whereas for Kant, empirical psychology can never be a genuine science--that is, an a priori discipline whose basic claims are necessarily true, law-governed, and known with certainty--due to the non-mathematizable and idiosyncratically subjective character of its subject-matter (MFNS 4: 470-471), by contrast for Brentano phenomenology is a genuine empirical science founded on first-person epistemic self-evidence and certainty. This lingering Cartesian assumption of a "privileged access" to mental phenomena (implying, in effect, their intrinsic non-relationality, logical privacy, infallibility, ineffability, and immediate apprehensibility) in Brentano’s phenomenology--an assumption which would have been thoroughly rejected by Kant--has fundamental significance for the phenomenological tradition. For to the extent that an assumption of privileged access is retained, it entails that phenomenology is always teetering on the edge of a Cartesian phenomenalism.

4.2 Kant, Husserl, Phenomenology, and Philosophical Logic

Husserlian phenomenology began as philosophical logic. In Edmund Husserl’s first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations, Vol. I (1891), he applied Brentano’s phenomenology to arithmetic cognition. But unfortunately he also committed the cardinal sin of logical psychologism: the explanatory reduction of the necessary, a priori, and universal subject-matter of logic to the contingent, a posteriori, and relativized subject-matter of empirical psychology. This sin was very helpfully pointed out to him in a devastating book review by Gottlob Frege. As a consequence, the second volume of the Philosophy of Arithmetic never appeared.

In his second book however, Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900), Husserl expiated his sin and also indirectly obtained a suitable revenge against Frege. He did this by working out a lengthy, rigorous, and radical critique of logical psychologism in the context of a strongly rationalistic--and officially anti-Kantian--conception of pure logic, thereby becoming the leading German philosopher of logic, and completely outshining Frege on the contemporary scene. Husserl’s official anti-Kantianism--"for even transcendental psychology also is psychology"--is misleading, however. This is because Kant in actual fact explicitly rejected logical psychologism in the first Critique (CPR A52-55/B77-79). So the real issue between Kant and Husserl about logic has to do with whether pure logic has a "transcendental" foundation in Kant’s sense (that is, whether pure logic fundamentally depends on the spontaneous mental processing abilities of our innate a priori cognitive capacities), or not. This was not resolved until Husserl decisively opted for the Kantian doctrine in his later Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929).

In any case the Prolegomena was published as the first volume of an even bigger book, Logical Investigations, in which, equally brilliantly and remarkably, Husserl directly applied Brentano’s phenomenology to foundational topics in philosophical logic: meaning, pure logical grammar or syntax, mereology (the logic of parts and wholes, closely related to both property-theory and set-theory), the nature of intentional content of all sorts, propositions and judgment-acts, truth, and propositional knowledge. Nevertheless Brentano was not the only or even the primary influence on Husserl’s approach to philosophical logic. In the first (1901) edition of Logical Investigations, as Husserl explicitly admitted in the second (1913) edition, "I spoke of ‘pure grammar’, a name conceived and expressly devised to be analogous to Kant’s ‘pure science of nature’." Husserl also introduced an importantly new idea about intentionality that was a significant advance over Brentano’s doctrine: namely, a sharp and explicit distinction between (i) the subjectively conscious "lived experience" (Erlebnis) or "act" (Akt) of intentionality (ii) the objectively existing and intersubjectively shareable logical or semantic"content" (Inhalt) of intentionality and (iii) the mind-independent "objective reference" (objektive Beziehung) of intentionality. More precisely Husserl showed how, while each of these is an intrinsic feature of every intentional mental state, each component can nevertheless vary logically independently of the other. Ironically enough, in contemporary writings Frege also systematically developed essentially the same distinction between what he calls (i*) the subjective "idea" (Vorstellung) or attitudinal "coloration" (Farbung), (ii*) "sense" (Sinn), and (iii*) "reference" (Bedeutung). Nevertheless, if the truth be told, both Husserl and Frege were merely recurring to Kant’s threefold distinction, made explicitly in and throughout the first Critique, between

(i**) the phenomenal Materie of inner sense, that is, its subjectively experienced attitudes, desires, feelings, sensations, and images, (ii**) the Inhalt of concepts or judgments, that is, their descriptive or propositional semantic content, and (iii*) the Beziehung of "intuitions" (Anschauungen) or the Umfang of "concepts" (Begriffe), that is, their singular or general objective reference.

There is however a fundamental meta-philosophical tension in Logical Investigations. This tension is that Brentano’s phenomenology, as a descendant of Kant’s empirical psychology, is at bottom factual and empirical, while Husserl’s phenomenology is irreducibly modal, non-empirical, and non-logical. Husserl’s response to this tension is to reinterpret Brentano’s notion of self-evident inner perception as a priori insight (Einsicht) or a priori self-evidence (Evidenz). So for Husserl phenomenology has an a priori foundation, and its basic truths are synthetically necessary and a priori.

It may then seem that Husserl is back safely in the Kantian fold of transcendental psychology. Nevertheless there is another problem. Brentano’s phenomenology has no rational soul as a subjective foundation, but instead only a functional unity of human intentional activities, and Husserl had explicitly adopted this conception of the phenomenological ego in the first edition of Logical Investigations: "I must frankly confess, however, that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary centre of relations [to the contents of experience]." But by the second edition, Husserl explicitly realized that this would not suffice for an epistemic foundation of his apriorist version of phenomenology, and that he had to upgrade to a higher-order ego: "I have since managed to find [this ego], i.e., have learnt not to be led astray from a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms of the ego-metaphysic." In other words, he managed to find a Kant-style transcendental ego to ground his logical epistemology.

3. Kant, Husserl, and Transcendental Phenomenology

 

 

According to Husserl in his Idea of Phenomenology (1907), Ideas I (1913), and Cartesian Meditations (1931), finding a transcendental ego requires a special philosophical effort, or more precisely a series of such efforts. Recall that the function of a transcendental ego for Husserl is to ground his a priori rationalist phenomenological epistemology. And a transcendental ego in the Kantian sense is not a Cartesian mental substance, but instead an innate spontaneous non-empirical cognitive capacity for self-consciousness. So the nature of a transcendental ego must be such that the act of self-conscious reflection suffices for the knowledge of the propositional content of intentionality. This in turn requires (a) that this propositional content be guaranteed to true, and (b) that this content be grasped by the thinking subject with self-evidence. And that in turn requires (a*) that this propositional content be materially identical with the truth-making object of the proposition, and also (b*) that the form of this propositional content be immediately and infallibly apprehended by the thinking subject.

Husserl secures condition (a*) by means of what he calls "the transcendental-phenomenological reduction." This treats the logical or semantic content of intentionality (now dubbed the "noema," as opposed to the "noesis," which is the intentional act) as identical to the objective reference of intentionality, and is therefore broadly equivalent to Kant’s breathtaking fusion of transcendental idealism and empirical realism. But there is a subtle difference. Whereas Kant had argued for both his transcendental idealism and empirical realism theses via his thesis of the transcendental ideality of space and time, Husserl takes a different route, which he rather unhelpfully calls by the Greek term "epoché," and only slightly more helpfully calls "abstention" (Enthaltung), "bracketting" (Einklammerung), and "putting out of play" (außer spiel zu setzen). The basic idea goes back to Brentano’s idea of an intentional "presentation" of an object and to Husserl’s own corresponding notion of a "mere presentation" in Logical Investigations V: it is one thing to represent an object or state-of-affairs as actually existing, and another thing altogether to represent it merely as possibly not existing. Given Cartesian skeptical doubts, the object possibly does not exist. Assuming that this possibility obtains in the actual world, then all that remains for the thinking subject of intentionality is the logico-semantic presentational content which represents the object in a certain way. So this logico-semantic presentational content becomes the new or indirect object of intentionality. Frege discusses essentially the same idea under the rubric of the "indirect reference" of meaningful expressions in "opaque" contexts--that is, ordinary referring expressions falling within the scope of certain psychological verbs followed by propositional complements, such as ‘believes that’ or ‘wonders whether’, and so-on--although without the Cartesian and Kantian metaphysical backdrops assumed by Husserl. What the parallel with Frege shows is that transcendental idealism and empirical realism do not automatically follow from the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, but must in fact be a further metaphysical hypothesis added by Husserl in order to guarantee the truth of the propositional content to which the truth-making object has been "reduced."

Correspondingly, Husserl secures condition (b*) by means of what he calls "seeing essences" (Wesensschau, Wesenserschauung) and "eidetic intuition." Despite the allusion to the platonic eidos however, seeing essences is not supposed by Husserl to be platonic insight, or a mysterious infallible grasp of mind-independent, non-spatiotemporal, causally inert, universal, ideal objects; nor is it supposed to be Leibnizian insight, or the infallible, certain, clear and distinct awareness of innate ideas. Instead it is Kantian insight, which is a reflective awareness of just those formal elements of representational content that express the spontaneous transcendental activity of the subject in synthesizing that content: "reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design" (CPR Bxiii). So Kantian insight is a special form of self-knowledge. More specifically, Kantian insight includes elements of conceptual "decomposition" (Zergliederung), of pure "formal intuition" (formale Anschauung), and also of the "figurative synthesis" or "transcendental synthesis of the imagination" or "synthesis speciosa" (CPR A5/B9, B151, B160 n.).

The crucial point of contrast with Husserl’s eidetic insight however, is Kant’s fallibilistic thesis that insight yields at best only a subjective sufficiency of belief or "conviction" (Überzeugung), but not, in and of itself, objective "certainty" (Gewißheit) (CPR A820-822/B848-850). The world must independently contribute a"given" element, the manifold of sensory content, in order for knowledge to be possible (CPR B145). Husserl, by sharp contrast, takes eidetic insight to be infallible and certain, which again shows his troublesome tendency to run together Kantian transcendental idealism/empirical realism, which is explicitly anti-Cartesian, and Cartesian epistemology, which entails a corresponding Cartesian metaphysics of substance dualism. Descartes’s epistemology is forever haunted by skepticism, and Descartes’s dualism of mental substance (whose essence is thinking) and physical substance (whose essence is extension) is forever haunted by the unintelligibility of mind-body interconnection and interaction. The phenomenological tradition would have been much better off if Cartesian Meditations had been Kantian Reflections.

4. Kant, Heidegger, and the Analytic of Dasein

In short, Heidegger is a radical Kantian externalist about intentional content. But he is also an existential Kantian pragmatist about intentional content. For he posits an irreducibly nonconceptual practical element in perceptual intentionality, by treating it as the directly engaged and attentively absorbed skillful manipulation of a fundamentally usable commonsense world. Correspondingly he treats propositional linguistic intentionality as a form of "interpretation" (Auslegung) or worldly hermeneutics based on a projective "understanding" (construed now in the gerundive form of Verstehen, as opposed to Kant’s noun-substantive Verstand) whereby meaning is essentially contextually-determined.

This in turn implies that the classical accounts of perception and empirical judgment, as the sense-datum-mediated and logically-mediated quasi-pictorial representations of a microphysically real material thing-in-itself of modern natural science, are both deeply misleading. Perception and judgment for Heidegger are worldly human performances in a world of self-manifesting or cognitively accessible, fundamentally usable appearances, and not passive mirrorings of a set of colorless, valueless, intrinsic non-relational, essentially hidden or cognitively inaccessible, fundamentally physical properties.

Heidegger’s other deeply important Kant-inspired phenomenological innovation was to emphasize spontaneous affect, feeling, and volitional action over passive sensation and sensa (or phenomenal qualia) in intentionality, and thereby to construe consciousness and cognition alike as irreducibly emotive, active, and normative. For this reason he calls object-directed intentionality "concern" (Bekümmerung). This revolutionary Kant-driven Heideggerian re-working of the mind-world relation is, in turn, deeply similar in many ways to John Dewey’s contemporary and independent development of radical externalist pragmatism in Experience and Nature (1925/29).

It is significant that like Husserlian phenomenology, Heideggerian phenomenology also began as philosophical logic. In his 1913 doctoral thesis, The Theory of Judgment in Psychologism, Heidegger isolated the logico-semantic question, "what is the sense (or point) of sense?" ("Was is der Sinn des Sinnes?") as a fundamental philosophical problem. The other fundamental philosophical problem animating Heidegger in the years prior to Being and Time was the question, "what is the being (or essence) of being?," something which had obsessed him ever since he had read Brentano’s On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle as a precocious Gymnasium student in 1907. From 1909 to 1911 he closely studied Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and began to identify logico-semantic issues with ontological issues. So first philosophy for early Heidegger was the phenomenological analysis of logic, meaning, and the world. This is clearly a recurrence to the basic themes of Kant’s transcendental logic in the Metaphysical Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding (CPR A66-83/B91-116). It is also precisely where the 20^th century analytic tradition begins. Indeed, Heidegger’s second published work in philosophy was "New Investigations in Logic" (1912), a sympathetic survey of contemporary logical theory, including the first volume of Bertrand Russell’s and A.N. Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910). As we saw in section 3, analytic philosophy and phenomenology alike were the natural progeny of the Kantian tradition; and as we will see in section 6, they did not have a genuine falling-out until after 1945. Like most fallings-out between siblings, the inside story is interestingly complicated.

5. Kantian Themes in the Early Analytic Tradition

5.1 What Analytic Philosophy Is

The analytic tradition is based on two core ideas: (1) that all necessary truth is logical truth, which is the same as analytic a priori truth, and that there are no non-logical or non-analytic necessary truths (the thesis of modal monism), and (2) that all a priori knowledge is knowledge of analytic truths and follows directly from the process of

(2.1) logically decomposing analytic propositions into conceptual or metaphysical simples which are mind-independently real yet immediately and infallibly apprehended with self-evidence, and then (2.2) rigorously logically reconstructing those propositions by formal deduction from (a) general logical laws and (b) premises that express logical definitional knowledge in terms of the simple constituents (the thesis of a priori knowledge as decompositional analysis).

Both core ideas are explicitly anti-Kantian. For Kant holds (1*) that there are two irreducibly different kinds of necessary a priori truth, namely (a) logically or analytically necessary a priori truths, and (b) non-logically or synthetically necessary a priori truths (the thesis of modal dualism again), and (2*) that a priori knowledge can be directed to either analytically or synthetically necessary a priori truths, but in either case (as we have seen already in section 4.2) this knowledge stems essentially from a reflective awareness of just those formal elements of representational content that express the spontaneous transcendental activity of the subject in cognitively synthesizing or mentally processing that content (the thesis of a priori knowledge as self-knowledge).

So what is analytic philosophy? The simple answer is that analytic philosophy is what Frege, G.E. Moore, Russell, and Rudolf Carnap did for a living after they rejected Kant. The subtler answer--because it includes the major contribution of Ludwig Wittgenstein--is that analytic philosophy is the rise and fall of the concept of analyticity.

Frege was undoubtedly the founding grandfather of analytic philosophy, by virtue of his bold and brilliant attempt to reduce arithmetic systematically to pure logic, whose theorems are all analytic, and thereby demonstrate (i) that Kant was miserably mistaken in holding that all arithmetic truth and knowledge is synthetic a priori, and (ii) that arithmetic proof is a fully rigorous and scientific enterprise. This is the beginning of the project of logicism, which Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Carnap all pursued in the first three decades of the 20^th century. Logicism provides the first half of modal monism. The second half of modal monism is provided by the rejection of the very idea of a synthetic a priori proposition. This was the unique contribution of Wittgenstein and Carnap, via the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis) and logical positivism, in the third and fourth decades of the 20^th century. Frege himself held, like Kant, that geometry is synthetic a priori.

5.2 Kant, Moore, and the Nature of Judgment

In view of Frege’s partial Kantianism, Moore was in fact the founding father of philosophical analysis. Paradoxically however, Moore invented analysis not so much by writing about it, as instead by living it, that is, by virtue of his passionately and relentlessly deploying the method of of decompositional analysis in his early philosophical writings, and by the powerful influence of his charismatic philosophical personality on Russell and Wittgenstein.

Moore began his philosophical career as a psychologistic neo-Kantian, and wrote his fellowship dissertation on Kant for Trinity College Cambridge under the direction of the equally neo-Kantian and Brentano-inspired philosophical psychologist James Ward, who had previously been Moore’s undergraduate supervisor and mentor at Trinity. But like other young philosophers with minds of their own--and, ironically enough, quite like the early Husserl in relation to Brentano--Moore vigorously rejected the teachings of his teacher. Moore’s specific act of rebellion against his Kantian and Brentanian mentor Ward was to develop a sharply anti-psychologistic, anti-idealistic, and radically realistic critique of Kant’s theory of judgment. Correspondingly, he also developed a sharply anti-psychologistic and radically realistic (and in particular, moral-intuitionist) extension of Kant’s ethics, although in this respect Moore quite explicitly followed Brentano’s Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong. In any case, Moore’s critique of Kant’s theory of judgment was later published in his remarkable papers "The Nature of Judgment" (1899) and "The Refutation of Idealism" (1903). And in the same year as "Refutation," Moore also published his radical extension of Kant’s ethics in Principia Ethica (for some details, see section 9.1).

Moore’s ostensible target in "The Nature of Judgment" is the neo-Hegelian F.H. Bradley’s theory of judgment in his Principles of Logic (1883). But the real target is Kant. Moore’s basic objection is that Bradley’s (read: Kant’s) theory of judgment involves a psychologistic confusion between two senses of the "content" of a cognition: (i) content as that which literally belongs to the phenomenally conscious mental act of cognizing (the psychologically immanent content, or intentional act-content); and

(ii) content as that at which the mental act is directed, or "about" (the psychologically transcendent content, or objective intentional content). The communicable meaning and truth-or-falsity of the judgment belong strictly to objective intentional content. According to Moore, the Bradley-Kant theory of judgment assimilates the objective intentional content of judgment--that is, the proposition--to the act-content of judging. This is what, in the Preface to Principia Ethica, Moore glosses as

For Moore himself by contrast, judgments are essentially truth-bearing or falsity-bearing connections of mind-independent platonic universals called "concepts." So concepts are decidedly not, as they were for Kant, simple or complex unities of mental content under the analytic and synthetic unities of self-consciousness. Nor do Moorean concepts and judgments relate to objects in the world, as concepts and judgments alike had for Kant, via directly referential, singular, existential, nonconceptual sensory mental representations, or "intuitions." On the contrary and in explicit rejection of Kant’s theory of judgment, for Moore complex concepts and judgments alike are mind-independent logically unified semantic complexes built up out of simple concepts grasped by direct platonic insight. But not only that: according to Moore the world itself is nothing but a nexus of simple or complex concepts insofar as they enter into true propositions. No wonder then that, as his fellow Cambridge Apostle and philosophical sparring partner the logician and economist John Meynard Keynes later wrily reported, Moore once had a nightmare in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables.

Moore’s "Refutation of Idealism" and his corresponding Aristotelian Society paper "Kant’s Idealism" (1904) are even more explicitly anti-Kantian. Here Moore ingeniously doubly assimilates Kant’s transcendental idealism to Brentano and to Berkeley by interpreting Kantian appearances as sensory intentional objects that "in-exist" or are nothing but immanent contents of phenomenal consciousness. This of course completely overlooks Kant’s crucial distinction between inner sense and outer sense, not to mention his equally crucial doctrine of empirical realism, and his Refutation of Idealism (CPR B274-279). And it also incidentally ushered in another hundred years of phenomenalistic interpretations of Kant’s theory of appearances.

By vivid contrast to Kant’s supposed phenomenalism however, Moore’s radical realism is the thesis that every object exists as the external relatum of the intentionality of a sheer transparent subjective consciousness. But this implies, in an odd reversal of Brentano’s doctrine of mental phenomena--whereby intentional objects reduce to "immanent objectivities"--that all intentional contents are now external intentional objects, and that therefore there will be as many mind-independently real objects as there are fine-grained differences between intentional contents. So Moore uses the transparency of consciousness to escape Brentano’s Box of narrowly ideal phenomenal content, only to lose himself in a platonic Looking-Glass world of unrestrictedly many real intentional objects, one for every possible act of thought--presumably even including the impossible ones that the White Queen boasted of having before breakfast. Brentano’s student, the radical phenomenological ontologist Alexius Meinong, had gone through precisely the same looking-glass. Russell’s great task as an analytic philosopher was to bring them all back alive.

5.3 Kant, Russell, and Logicism

Russell like Moore began his philosophical career as a psychologistic neo-Kantian, in an early treatise on the nature of geometry, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897), that was also based on his Trinity fellowship dissertation. The basic point of the Essay was to determine what could be preserved of Kant’s Euclid-oriented theories of space and geometry after the discovery and development of non-Euclidean geometries. Russell had been supervised by Ward too, and by Whitehead. At the same time there was also a significant Hegelian element in Russell’s early thought, inspired by his close study of Bradley’s Logic and discussions with another Trinity man and fellow Apostle, the imposingly-named Scottish Hegelian metaphysician John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. Despite being a close friend of Russell’s, Moore wrote a sternly critical review of the Essay which was comparable in its both its philosophical content and its impact on Russell to Frege’s review of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, in that it acccused Russell of committing the "Kantian fallacy" of grounding a priori modal claims on psychological facts. Moore’s stinging criticism seems to have almost instantly liberated Russell from his neo-Kantian and Hegelian beliefs. This, combined with the close study of Meinong’s writings, led him to a radically realistic Moorean see-through epistemology and a correspondingly rich Looking-Glass ontology of concrete and abstract real individuals, although he prudently stopped well short of accepting the existence or subsistence of Meinongian impossibilia.

In any case, powered up by strong shots of Moore and Meinong, Russell’s titanically brilliant, restless, and obsessive intellect was now focused excusively on the logical foundations of mathematics, and deeply engaged with the works of George Boole, Frege, and the Italian logician Guiseppe Peano. By 1903 Russell had produced the massive Principles of Mathematics, and then by 1910, in collaboration with Whitehead, the even more massive Principia Mathematica. Above all however, on the collective basis of his intellectual encounters with Kant, Bradley, Boole, Frege, Peano, Whitehead, Moore, and Meinong, he developed a fundamental conception of symbolic or mathematical logic. Symbolic or mathematical logic as Russell understood it is the non-psychological, universal, necessary, and a priori science of deductive consequence, expressed in a bivalent propositional and polyadic predicate calculus with identity as well as quantification over an infinity of individuals, properties, and various kinds of functions. Logic in this heavy-duty sense has correspondingly heavy-duty metaphysical implications. But most importantly for our purposes here, Russell’s symbolic logic expresses the direct avoidance of Kant’s appeal to intuitions in the constitution of mathematical propositions and reasoning:

Recall that Russell’s notion of analysis in the period from 1900 to 1913 is logicistic, platonistic, radically realistic, and grounded epistemically on a series of self-evident infallible acquaintances with the simple concrete or abstract constituents of propositions. One problem with this notion is that Russell never provides an adequate explanation of how a human mind in real time and space can be directly related to causally inert non-spatiotemporal universals (the problem of non-empirical knowledge). Another problem is how propositions construed as ordered complexes of individuals, properties, and relations, along with logical connectives or constants such as all, some, and, or, not, and if-then,can ever be formally or materially unified into coherent, semantically unambiguous truth-bearers (the problem of the unity of the proposition). A third problem is that the notion of a direct self-evident infallible acquaintance with logical constants, as if they were regular objects alongside real individuals, properties, and relations, seems absurd (the problem of the nature of the logical constant). And a fourth and final problem is that Russell never adequately clarifies the nature or status of logical necessity, and in particular whether logical truths are analytic a priori, synthetic apriori, or something else (the problem of the nature of necessity). To be sure, all four problems had already been handled by Kant by means of his transcendental idealism: non-empirical knowledge is based on transcendental reflection or self-knowledge; the unity of the proposition is based on the transcendental unity of apperception; logical constants are nothing but universal functions of thought, corresponding to pure concepts of the understanding; and logical necessity is irreducibly analytic necessity, not synthetic necessity. But it was precisely the Kantian approach that Russell was abandoning. So these possible solutions to his problems were already ruled out, and he was thereby driven into a theoretical cul de sac.

Russell and Wittgenstein were personally divided by World War I. Russell very bravely professed pacifism in a nation hell-bent on smashing the Germans, and was imprisoned by the British government and lost his Trinity fellowship--a bellicose and by now philosophically alienated McTaggart working hard to bring this about--for his troubles. Wittgenstein went back to Austria and very bravely fought on the German side, and was imprisoned by the Allies in Italy after the German surrender for his troubles. Back in England however, by the end of the Great War Russell had completely capitulated to Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical analysis. He officially recorded this conversion in his long essay, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism":

The "certain ideas" which Russell learned from Wittgenstein were elaborately worked out in a stunningly unorthodox masterpiece written from 1913-18 and published in 1921, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This "logico-philosophical treatise" (Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung)offers a radically new conception of philosophical analysis, according to which

5.5 Kant, Carnap, and Logical Positivism

Wittgenstein conformed his actions to his written words, and gave up philosophy for roughly 10 years after the publication of the Tractatus. During Wittgenstein’s "silent decade"--equally but oppositely, Kant’s own silent decade had immediately preceded the publication of the first Critique--Carnap was discovering his own voice. Falling into what will by now no doubt seem like a familiar pattern, and indeed very like Russell, Carnap started his philosophical career as a neo-Kantian philosopher of the foundations of geometry:

The Aufbau played a crucial variation on Russell’s platonistic conception of philosophical analysis by turning it into constructive empiricism, which can be glossed as follows:

In any case, Carnap’s Aufbau and Logical Syntax, together with the basic writings of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and also Moritz Schlick’s General Theory of Knowledge (1925), became the philosophical basis of the Vienna Circle, which flourished throughout most of the 30s, until the coming-to-power of the Nazis in Germany caused the diaspora of its core membership to England and the USA. The political leanings of the inner circle of the Circle were radical socialist, universalist, egalitarian, and communist. So staying in Austro-Germany would have most certainly meant their cultural and intellectual deaths, and very probably their actual deaths too.

The Circle philosophically professed logical positivism or logical empiricism, which is essentially the fusion of Carnap’s constructive empiricism and logical conventionalism, plus the explicit rejection of Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori. According to Carnap, synthetic a priori propositions are meaningless because they violate rules of the logical syntax of language. And according to Schlick, the official founder and leader of the Circle, synthetic a priori propositions are meaningless because they are neither tautological logical truths (analytic truths) nor verifiable factual empirical truths, and analyticity and verifiability exhaust the possible sources of cognitive significance. The Carnap-Schlick attack on the synthetic a priori, plus constructive empiricism, plus logico-linguistic conventionalism, plus the general semantic thesis that all and only meaningful propositions are either analytic logical truths or else verifiable empirical factual propositions (the Verifiability Principle or VP), were all crisply formulated and beautifully written up for English-speaking philosophers in A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1936).

It is however a notorious and serious problem for Ayer in particular, and for the Vienna Circle more generally, that the VP itself is neither an analytic proposition nor a factual proposition. Looked at with a wide lens, the problem of the logico-semantic status of the VP is merely a special case of Wittgenstein’s earlier worry about the logico-semantic status of his Tractarian logico-philosophical propositions. A standard "solution" to the special worry is to say that the VP is a meta-linguistic or meta-logical proposition: the VP is nothing but a further bit of language and logic that also happens to be about language and logic. But unfortunately that in turn only invokes an even more general and intractable worry about the logico-semantic status of meta-languages and meta-logics: the logocentric predicament, which says that logic is epistemically circular, in the sense that any attempt to explain or justify logic must itself presuppose and use some or all of the very logical principles and concepts that it aims to explain or justify. The obvious way out of these problems would be to return to Kantian modal dualism and say that the VP is non-logically necessary or synthetic a priori. But of course this violates the official positivist ban on the synthetic a priori.

6. A Parting of the Ways? Kant, the Davos Conference, and the Great Divide

In Davos Switzerland from 17 March to 6 April 1929, an "International University Course" sponsored by the Swiss, French, and German governments, brought together the leading neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, famous author of the multi-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1925, 1927, 1929), and the soon-to-be leading phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, famous author of Being and Time (1927), in an official and more or less explicit attempt to bring about a philosophical reconciliation between Marburg-ian (or science-oriented) neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. The soon-to-be leading logical positivist Rudolf Carnap was there too, along with many other professors and students from across Europe. And a good time was had by all: "It appears that the Davos encounter itself took place in atmosphere of extraordinarily friendly collegiality."

The key sessions at Davos were two lecture series by Cassirer and Heidegger, followed by a public disputation between them. Strikingly, both the lectures and the disputation dealt with the question of how to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason correctly. In other words, it was all about Kant and the neo-Kantian origins of phenomenology.

Now for this reason it can be argued, and indeed has been argued, that the Davos conference was emblematic of the death-by-mitosis of the neo-Kantian tradition, during the 1930s, into two fundamentally disinct and irreconcilable philosophical traditions: the analytic tradition (whose paradigm case was logical positivism), and the phenomenological tradition (whose paradigm case was existential phenomenology). According to this historical reconstruction, the basic disagreements between analysis and phenomenology were latent in the period from 1900-30, during which--as we have seen in sections 2 and 5--Moore, Russell, and Carnap all started their philosophical careers as neo-Kantians, went on to reject neo-Kantianism and Kant by means of foundational work in philosophical logic and the influence of the contemporary exact sciences, and then correspondingly worked out various new logically-driven conceptions of a priori analysis. And then, so the story goes, the latent eventually became manifest, and the post-Kantian stream of philosophical influence consisting of Brentanoà Husserl/Meinongà Heidegger was officially divided from the other post-Kantian stream consisting of Mooreà Russellà Wittgensteinà Carnap, basically because the phenomenologists rejected the Frege-Russell conception of symbolic logic while contrariwise the analysts affirmed symbolic logic. And never the twain shall meet.

But although this makes a conveniently neat story, it is at least arguably not quite true to the historico-philosophical facts. The highly collegial atmosphere at Davos was no polite put-on. Obviously there were some important differences and disagreements between logical positivism and existential phenomenology. Nevertheless Heidegger took Carnap very seriously as a philosopher well into the 1930s, and Carnap also took Heidegger very seriously as a philosopher well into the 30s. (As did Wittgenstein, and as also did Gilbert Ryle at Oxford--who, according to Michael Dummett, "began his career as an exponent of Husserl for British audiences and used to lecture on Bolzano, Brentano, Frege, Meinong, and Husserl" throughout the 20s and 30s, before undergoing a sort of reverse Pauline conversion in the mid-1940s and exorcising the phenomenologists’ mentalistic Ghost-in-the-Machine in his post-War anti-Cartesian masterpiece, The Concept of Mind [1949].)

For his part, Heidegger was every bit as dismissive of traditional metaphysics as Carnap was. And while it is quite true that Heidegger significantly criticized the Fregean-Russellian logic of Begriffsschrift and Principia,and challenged its metaphysical commitments, so too did Carnap: after all, that is the main point of Logical Syntax of Language! Furthermore, objectively considered, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is not essentially more different from or opposed to symbolic logic, or logical positivism for that matter, than is Dewey’s pragmatism, which despite its radical critical philosophical implications, cohabited very comfortably with mainstream analytic philosophy in the USA after 1945. Nor, objectively speaking, is Heidegger’s existential phenomenology essentially more different from or opposed to either pure logic, or logical positivism, than is Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as expressed in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), which despite its equally radical critical philosophical implications, also cohabited very comfortably with mainstream analytic philosophy in the USA and England after 1945.

So it appears that the Great Divide between analytic philosophy and phenomenology did not actually happen in the 1930s. And it also appears that the Divide is not the consequence of any fundamental philosophical disagreements between analysts and phenomenologists about symbolic logic. On the contrary, it appears that the Divide happened almost entirely after 1945, and that it was the joint result of the three following factors:

1. The sharply divisive cultural politics of anti-fascism and anti-communism in Anglo-American countries after World War II: Heidegger publically and notoriously supported the Nazis in the mid-30s; Vienna Circle exiles in the USA were understandably very eager to avoid being persecuted during the McCarthy communist-trials era for their pre-War radical-socialist and communist sympathies, so were generally playing it safe (Carnap however being a notable exception) by not rocking the boat; and the leading French phenomenologists Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were both closely politically associated with the radical Left.
2. The sharply divisive debate about the cultural-political significance and philosophical implications of the exact sciences after World War II: taking his cue from Heidegger’s Being and Time, but also reflecting on the worsening cultural-political situation in Europe, Husserl had seriously criticized the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the exact sciences in his Crisis of European Sciences; and then taking his cue directly from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty further deepened and developed this critique in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
3. The sharply divisive struggle for control of the major Anglo-American philosophy departments after World War II: given the aging and retirement of historically-trained philosophers, neo-Kantians, and neo-Hegelians, it was going to be either the analysts or the phenomenologists who took over, but not both.

7. Kantian themes in the Middle and Later Analytic Tradition

7.1 Kant, Quine, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

Although the official or institutional acceptance of the basic tenets of logical positivism by the leading Anglo-American philosophy departments did not fully occur until the end of the 1950s, by 1945 all that actually remained of Kant’s metaphysical legacy for philosophers in the analytic tradition were (a) the analytic-synthetic distinction, and (b) the notion of the a priori, including the idea that apriority and necessity entail each other. It is to be particularly noted however that both doctrines are intrinsic parts of the original foundations of analytic philosophy.

Yet these doctrines were repeatedly attacked from 1950 onwards until the end of the century by Carnap’s protégé and greatest critic, W.V.O. Quine. In fact, Quine’s "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) effectively destroyed logical empiricism or positivism and the philosophical basis of the analytic tradition along with it. So the analytic tradition quitely committed cognitive suicide by undermining its own Kantian foundations. Reflecting on this striking fact, it will perhaps seem to be a very puzzling thing that the institution of analytic philosophy has been able to get along so well since 1950 without any philosophical foundations. A possible solution to this puzzle will be proposed in section 7.3.

The two dogmas of logical empiricism attacked by Quine are (1) the thesis that there is a sharp and significant distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, and

(2) the thesis of "reductionism," which says that every empirically meaningful proposition has a unique translation into a determinate set of logically independent atomic propositions in a sense-datum language. Now any proposition that expresses the unique translation of an empirically meaningful proposition into a determinate set of logically independent propositions in a sense-datum language is itself going to be an analytic proposition. So if (1) goes down, then (2) also goes down. Therefore the crucial dogma is the analytic-synthetic distinction.

Quine’s argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction in "Two Dogmas" is famously crisp, and proceeds like the basic steps of a dance. He starts by defining analyticity as the truth of a statement by virtue of meanings alone, independendently of fact. Then he discards intensional meanings--that is, meanings that (a) are essentially descriptive in character, (b) are underdetermined by reference, (c) uniquely determine cross-possible-worlds extensions of terms, and (d) directly entail the modal concepts of necessity and possibility--on the grounds that intensions are nothing but "obscure intermediary entities" unhelpfully inserted between words and their Fregean reference or Bedeutung. Then he distinguishes between two types of analytic truth: (i) the truths of classical bivalent first-order predicate logic with identity, and (ii) analytic statements that are not truths of class (i), but that can be systematically translated into truths of class (i) by systematically replacing synonyms with synonyms. Then he accepts the analytic truths of class (i) as provisionally unproblematic, and focuses on the analytic truths of class (ii). Then he considers, case by case, three attempts to give a clear and determinate account of synonymy: definition, interchangeability, and semantic rules. Then he shows that each attempt ends in circularity by employing various notions that presuppose or entail the unreduced concept of intensional identity, and rejects them all. And then finally he concludes that without the provision of a non-circular account of synonymy,

(I) Quine’s argument clearly does not apply to Kant’s analytic-synthetic distinction, for two reasons. First, Quine says that a statement is analytic if and only if it is true by virtue of meanings independently of fact. But for Kant, this gloss would also hold of synthetic a priori propositions, because (a) "meanings" for him include both concepts and intuitions, (b) synthetic apriority is defined in terms of a proposition’s semantic dependence on pure intuitions, and (c) Quine presupposes without argument that there are no such things as synthetic a priori propositions. Kant would therefore reject the "if" part of Quine’s definition of analyticity. Second, according to Kant, a proposition is analytic if and only if it is necessarily true by virtue of intrinsic structural semantic relations between conceptual intensions. Since Quine will not countenance intrinsically structured intensions as meanings, this implies that Kant would also reject the "only if" part of Quine’s definition of analyticity. Indeed, since Quine rejects all semantic appeals to intensions from the outset, his attack on analyticity simply cannot apply to Kant’s theory.

(II) Furthermore Quine’s argument is clearly unsound, for four reasons. First, since he explicitly accepts analytic propositions of class (i), it is false to say that no sharp boundary can be found between analytic and synthetic statements. For there is by Quine’s own reckoning a sharp boundary between analytic truths of class (i) and all other truths. Second, as J.J. Katz points out, even if we focus exclusively on analytic truths of class (ii), those based on synonymy, the argument against the intelligibility of such truths is based entirely on an argument by cases, and Quine never gives an argument to show that his set of cases is exhaustive. Third, as H.P. Grice and P.F. Strawson argue, even if we grant that Quine has shown that every possible attempt to define analyticity in terms of synonymy for cases of class (ii) ends in circularity with respect to the notion of intensional identity, he still has not shown that an explanation of analyticity in terms of a circular network of irreducibly intensional notions is a philosophically bad thing: philosophical analysis can be a semantically non-reductive and holistic enterprise. Fourth and perhaps most damningly of all, Quine’s arguments for the rejection of intensions are both insufficient and self-stultifying, because he himself covertly presupposes intensions in order to explain the analytic truths of class (i).

So Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction does not actually apply to Kant, and is based on an unsound argument to boot. Still, the attack almost universally convinced analytic philosophers. For example, in a 40-year survey article on the philosophy of language and mind published in the Philosophical Review in 1992, Tyler Burge asserted that

7.2 Kant, Strawson, and Transcendental Arguments

At this point there is an important twist in the plot of our historical narrative: Strawson, the primary defender of philosophical analysis after Quine, was also a Kantian philosopher. But as we will see, Strawson’s highly influential version of Kantian philosophy nevertheless leaves 21^st century Kantians with a fundamental leftover problem to solve.

Strawson initially worked in philosophical logic, was strongly influenced by the Critique of Pure Reason, and also wrote an important treatise in transcendental metaphysics. Trained at Oxford before World War II by neo-Kantians and British Hegelians, and--along with his Oxford contemporaries J.L. Austin, Ayer, Dummett, Grice, and Ryle--heavily influenced by the logico-linguistic tradition stemming from Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, Strawson was arguably the most important British philosopher from 1945 to the end of the century.

We have already seen that along with Grice, Strawson defended the analytic-synthetic distinction against Quine by developing a non-reductive and holistic conception of philosophical analysis. This in turn is intimately connected with Strawson’s vigorous defense of irreducible conceptual intensionality in both logic and semantics, in Introduction to Logical Theory (1952), Logico-Linguistic Papers (1971), and Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (1974). Here it is obvious that Strawson’s line of thinking runs strongly parallel to Kant’s theory of judgment, analyticity, and logic, which is also explicitly based on irreducible conceptual intensionality.

Irreducible conceptual intensionality is also a basic theme of Strawson’s immensely influential book on Kant, The Bounds of Sense (1966). Bounds not only made it respectable for analytic philosophers to write books on topics in the history of philosophy; it also developed a highly original and still controversial interpretation of the first Critique that is at once semantically-oriented (Strawson treats Kant as a verificationist), anti-psychologistic (he rejects Kant’s transcendental psychology) , and anti-idealistic (he accuses Kant of Berkeleyanism).

The crucial move in Bounds, however, is to connect Kant’s seminal idea of a "transcendental "deduction or "transcendental proof" (CPR A84-92/B116-124, B274-279, A734-738/B762-766) directly with the logico-semantic concept of a presupposition that Strawson had developed in Introduction to Logical Theory. The result is the more-or-less Kantian notion of a transcendental argument. Now a presupposition can be contextually defined as follows: A proposition Q presupposes a proposition P if and only if the truth of P is a necessary condition of the truth of Q and also a necessary condition of the falsity of Q. Thus P is a necessary condition of the meaningfulness and truth-valuedness of Q. So what then is a transcendental argument? In its general form it looks like this:

1. Assume either the truth or the falsity of the proposition Q, where Q is a

 

 

contingent claim about the world of human experience.

2. Show that the proposition P is a (or the) presupposition of Q, where P is a claim

Strawson made explicit and liberal use of transcendental arguments in his ground-breaking book Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. So Individuals is a work firmly embedded in the Kantian tradition. Kant of course held that his transcendental deductions and proofs entailed transcendental psychology, idealism, and the synthetic apriority of P. And Strawson rejects idealism and modal dualism alike in favor of a thoroughly anti-psychologistic, non-reductive, holistic, analytical realism about individual universals, individual material objects, and individual persons. But leaving all that aside, it remains only a very slight exaggeration to say that Strawson’s "descriptive metaphysics" is Kant’s transcendental metaphysics minus Kant’s mentalism.

Nevertheless there is a serious worry about Strawson’s key notion of a transcendental argument. It is arguable that step (2) will never work unless semantic verificationism is true, and further that verificationism is true only if transcendental idealism is true and P is synthetic a priori. If this criticism is correct, then either verificationism and transcendental idealism are true and P is synthetic a priori, or else transcendental arguments are invalid. Alternatively, if this criticism is not correct, then it must be shown how step (2) can still work without verificationism, transcendental idealism, or the synthetic a priori. This is an unsolved problem that all Kantian philosophers after Strawson must face up to.

7.3 The End of the A Priori: Kant, Sellars, and Scientific Naturalism

In The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), the logical positivist and Vienna Circle insider Hans Reichenbach sketched an influential and widely-accepted account of the progress of modern philosophy that culminates with analytic philosophy and merges that progress ineluctably with the progress of the exact sciences. The basic idea is that philosophy is legitimate precisely to the extent that (1) it is analysis, and (2) it works on fundamental problems arising from mathematics and physics. This is an important historical thesis, not only because it resuscitates Locke’s 17^th century conception of philosophy as an "underlabourer" for the flagship sciences of the Scientific Revolution, but also and indeed primarily because its unabashed scientism was the engine that drove analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20^th century.

Now it is plausibly arguable, and has indeed been compellingly argued by, for example, Hilary Putnam and John McDowell, that the basic problem of European and Anglo-American analytic philosophy after 1950--and perhaps also the fundamental problem of modern philosophy--is how it is possible to reconcile two sharply different, seemingly incommensurable, and apparently even mutually exclusive metaphysical conceptions, or "pictures," of the world. On the one hand, there is the objective, non-phenomenal, perspectiveless, mechanistic, value-neutral, impersonal, and amoral metaphysical picture of the world delivered by pure mathematics and the fundamental natural sciences. And on the other hand there is the subjective, phenomenal, perspectival, teleological, value-laden, person-oriented, and moral metaphysical picture of the world yielded by the conscious experience of rational human beings. In 1963 Wilfrid Sellars evocatively dubbed these two sharply opposed world-conceptions "the scientific image" and "the manifest image." So I will call the profound difficulty raised by their mutual incommensurability and inconsistency the Two Images Problem.

From the 1950s onwards, a possible complete solution to the Two Images Problem gradually emerged, in the form of scientific or reductive naturalism. As we saw in section 2.2, scientific or reductive naturalism asserts, in Sellars’s crisp phrase, that "science is the measure of all things." More generally, scientific naturalism includes four basic theses:

There are two basic ways of holding the thesis that all knowledge and truths are a posteriori. One ways asserts the existence of necessary a posteriori truths and attempts to substitute them for all necessary apriori truths, and this is the doctrine of scientific essentialism, which will be discussed shortly. The other way asserts that all truths are contingent a posteriori, and this is the doctrine of modal skepticism, as defended by Quine. So, in other words, corresponding to scientific essentialism and Quine’s modal skepticism there are two ways of contradicting Kant’s theory of the a priori. The first way breaks the entailment from necessity to apriority. And the second way rejects the existence of necessity and apriority alike.

At this point there is another important historical twist in our narrative. This is the striking fact that Sellars was both the father of scientific naturalism and a leading Kantian. Wearing the latter hat, Sellars first formulated and defended the highly influential idea, later promoted by Donald Davidson and John McDowell, that inner or outer sensory experience has no independent cognitive significance, semantic implications, or logical force apart from conceptualization and thought. Thus percepts without concepts are rationally meaningless, or outside the logical space of reasons (cf. CPR A51/B76), and to hold otherwise is to fall fallaciously under the siren spell of "the Myth of the Given."

In McDowell’s hands, this Sellarsian doctrine becomes the widely-held contemporary thesis of conceptualism about mental content, which says (a) that all cognitive capacities are fully determined by conceptual capacities, and (b) that none of the cognitive capacities of rational human animals can also be possessed by non-rational animals, whether human or non-human. Now McDowell is not a scientific or reductive naturalist. And McDowell’s conceptualism is arguably more a Hegelian thesis than it is a Kantian thesis. But looked at from Sellars’s point of view, the deep connection between (i) conceptualism about mental content, (ii) scientific naturalism, and (iii) the Two Images Problem, is this: if scientific naturalism is true, and if we also fully reject the Myth of the Given, then our best exact scientific theories will ultimately determine the structure, content, and objects of inner and outer sensory experience. And in that way, the scientific image will both assimilate and eliminate the manifest image.

Oddly enough, although Sellars was the true father of scientific naturalism, Quine was the leading scientific naturalist in the latter half of the 20^th century even despite the presence of some important non-naturalistic strands in his work. But the combined Sellars-Quine doctrine of scientific naturalism still would not, perhaps, have convinced most mainstream analytic philosophers of its truth without the additional support of the highly influential doctrine of scientific essentialism that was developed by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. According to scientific essentialism,

1. natural kinds like gold and water have microphysical essences,
2. these essences are either known or are at least in principle knowable by

 

 

contemporary natural science,

3. propositions stating these essences, such as "Water is H₂O," are necessarily

 

 

true because statements of identity are necessarily true if true at all, and

4. essentialist necessary truths about natural kinds are knowable only

We now have in place the means to offer a possible solution to the historico-philosophical puzzle described in section 7.1. This puzzle was: how has analytic philosophy managed to get on so well institutionally since 1950 despite the fact that its Kantian foundations were undermined by Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction? And the possible solution I am proposing is: despite its foundational crisis, the analytic tradition has flourished since the middle of the 20^th century by affirming the Sellars-Quine doctrine of scientific naturalism, and by widely embracing scientific essentialism, and thus by latching itself for dear life onto the high speed train of the exact sciences.

8. Kantian Themes in the Middle and Later Phenomenological Tradition

8.1 Kant, Husserl, and the Crisis of European Sciences

But is this high-speed train actually heading straight for a big smash-up? In 1947, Wittgenstein had precisely that thought:

In the Crisis, Husserl attempts to combine his transcendental phenomenology with the profound existential-phenomenological thesis that the conscious, intentional, cognizing, and knowing rational human subject is necessarily embodied as a living animal, and also necessarily situated in and actively engaged with an integrated network of spatiotemporal, macrophysical, practical, intersubjective or social, and historical contexts. He called this total network the "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt). By sharp contrast, the classical conception of the rational human subject and its world which is offered by the exact sciences, either (1) converts the rational human subject into an alienated, fundamentally non-physical, causally-isolated or even epiphenomenal phenomenally conscious Cartesian ego over against a fundamentally physical world of causally efficacious microphysical entities and forces (= Cartesian substance dualism plus Boyle’s and Locke’s microphysicalism), or else (2) explanatorily and ontologically reduces the human subject to nothing but fundamentally physical properties and facts (= reductive materialism). In either case we are in serious philosophical trouble because, as Kant had explicitly pointed out in the first Critique, both human knowledge and freedom are thereby rendered respectively impossible by the Cartesian skepticism entailed by (1) and the "hard" or incompatibilist determinism entailed by (2). But as Husserl makes very clear, since the exact sciences themselves are rational human enterprises seemingly based on the presuppositions of human knowledge and freedom, this means that the sciences themselves are in serious trouble too: hence their foundational "crisis."

The only way out of the crisis, according to Husserl, is to invert the epistemic and metaphysical foundations, and show how exact science is in fact explanatorily and ontologically founded on the lifeworld, which is then in turn intentionally "constituted" by the transcendental ego. This of course is a classically Kantian move. But will Husserl’s lifeworld-constituting "transcendental-phenomenological turn" be able to avoid falling back into Cartesian substance dualism?

8.2 The End of Phenomenology: Kant, Derrida, and Deconstructionism

According to the highly influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the answer was a resounding no. Derrida started his career as a Husserlian phenomenologist--his thesis at the Ecole Normale Supérieure was a general study of Husserl’s phenomenology, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy--but critically broke away from the phenomenological tradition, and more famously and influentially set up shop as a deconstructionist.

Derrida’s deconstructionism consists, at bottom, in a great many subtle variations on the following fairly straightforward five-step argument:

1. Traditional metaphysics in general and Kant’s metaphysics in particular is

 

 

essentially the "metaphysics of presence," or the attempt to find objects, properties, facts, or principles that are directly, self-evidently, and infallibly given to the cognitive subject.

2. The metaphysics of presence in turn presupposes "logocentrism," or the

 

 

assumption of a unitary logic, syntax, and semantics underlying all languages and at the basis of all rationality.

3. But cognitive access to objects, properties, facts, and principles is necessarily

 

 

mediated by language-in-use, which is also essentially open to multiple interpretations, some of which are inconsistent with other interpretations.

4. So the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism are both false, and

 

 

rationality is inherently self-undermining or "undecidable" in roughly Kurt Gödel’s sense of a proposition that is logically true if and only if it is logically false.

5. Therefore, traditional metaphysics in general and Kant’s metaphysics in

The basic thesis linking together both Derridean studies is that while phenomenology purports to criticize and replace traditional metaphysics in general and Kant’s metaphysics in particular, it falls directly back into the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism. And then just like traditional metaphysics and Kant’s metaphysics alike, phenomenology for that reason is ultimately impossible. As a consequence of this deconstructionist worry, together with a more sympathetic but in fact philosophically far more rigorous critique of Husserl’s epistemology in 1974 by the Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (ironically enough, delivered as the Cassirer Lectures at Yale), by the end of the 1970s phenomenology was widely regarded as a philosophical program that had come to an end, except in the form of the exegetical historical-philosophical study of Husserl’s texts and the texts of those significantly influenced by Husserl--in particular, the early Heidegger, early Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. And unlike analytic philosophy, which closely linked its fate to that of the massively successful and culturally dominant exact sciences, phenomenology firmly rejected scientific or reductive naturalism at about mid-century, and so institutionally had largely withered away by the end of the 20^th century as well.

9. Kantian Themes in Ethics

9.1 Kant, Moore Again, and the Naturalistic Fallacy

Thus far we have been following the direct and indirect protean influences of Kant’s Critical Philosophy on the mainstream of 20^th century philosophy running from neo-Kantianism up through the European and Anglo-American analytic and phenomenological traditions. But this story almost exclusively concerns the role of Kant’s metaphysics. What about the role of Kant’s ethics?

One crucial difference between the role of Kant’s metaphysics and the role of his ethics in 20^th century philosophy is that whereas Kant’s metaphysics is the original foundation of analytic philosophy and phenomenology alike, his ethics by sharp contrast always was (and still is) in direct competition with two other equally important moral traditions: (1) the utilitarian consequentialist tradition, which runs backwards through J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and second Enquiry, and (2) the contractualist tradition, which runs backwards through Rousseau and Locke to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Adequately narrating and then critically analyzing the philosophical story of the interplay between Kantian ethics, utilitarian consequentialism, and contractualism in the 20^th century would easily use up another chapter at least as long as this one. Nevertheless, two scenes from that story are directly relevant to the present account.

The first scene comes from the first decade of the century, and concerns Moore’s seminal treatise in moral theory, Principia Ethica. The Principia is a characteristically ingenious and intensely passionate attempt to combine various elements of Henry Sidgwick’s and J.S. Mill’s utilitarian consequentialist (that is, hedonic, instrumentalist, and results-oriented) ethics with Kant’s deontological (that is, duty-based, non-instrumentalist, and intentions-oriented) ethics. Moore does this by way of a radical critique of what he calls ethical "naturalism":

Moore’s basic argument in support of the putative fallaciousness of the naturalistic fallacy--the "open question argument"--is generally held to be a notorious failure. Here is his argument:

The open question argument is doomed because of a mistake Moore has made about the individuation of properties. The problem is that the argument implies a criterion of property-identity that is absurdly strict. Familiar criteria of identity for two properties include equivalence of analytic definition, synonymy of their corresponding predicates, and identity of their cross-possible-worlds extensions. But Moore’s criterion is importantly different:

From the standpoint of Kantian ethics however the result is far more dire, since Moore’s mistake seems to cast doubt on the fundamental Kantian ought-is and altruism-self-interest distinctions that had originally motivated Moore’s attack on the naturalistic fallacy. Yet we must not confuse the messenger with the message. This is because for Kant, as we saw in section 2.2, these distinctions have an independent foundation in our innate spontaneous mental capacity of pure practical reason.

9.2 Kantian Ethics after Rawls

The second scene from the story of Kant’s ethics in 20^th century philosophy comes from the period after 1950. The dominant figure in moral philosophy during this period was the Harvard philosopher John Rawls, whose Theory of Justice (1971) had an impact on post-World War II moral and political theory fully comparable to that of his departmental colleague Quine’s earlier paper "Two Dogmas" on post-War semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics.

But unlike "Two Dogmas," yet very like Strawson’s Individuals, and again also very like the influential theory of "communicative ethics" developed in the same period by Jürgen Habermas, Rawls’s Theory of Justice is in fundamental ways a work firmly embedded in the Kantian tradition. Just as Moore had attempted to combine utilitarian consequentialism with Kant’s ethics, so Rawls’s project is to combine contractualism with Kant’s ethics. This leads Rawls to two basic ideas. The first basic idea is that the first principles of morality are indeed categorical or unconditional and non-instrumental just as Kant had argued, but also essentially procedural or constructive, not substantive. (More on this in a moment.) The second basic idea is that Kantian moral principles are not grasped either by Kantian pure practical reason or by a Moorean intuition of the Good, but instead are to be generated by a contractualist methodology which asks what a group of rational human participants in a social contract would agree to, by way of a set of procedural principles of justice-as-fairness, on the purely hypothetical assumption (called "the veil of ignorance") that the actual identities and worldly circumstances of the participants in the contract-forming assembly are not known.

Rawls’s veil-of-ignorance methodology is not dissimilar to Husserl’s epoché (see section 4.2 above), although in an intersubjective rather than a solipsistic context. But the crucial point for our purposes is the idea that the Kantian first principles of morality are essentially procedural or constructive, and not substantive. This important Rawlsian idea has been further developed by several of Rawls’s students, most notably Thomas Hill, Christine Korsgaard and Onora O’Neill, both as a way of interpreting Kant’s Categorical Imperative (which I have also adopted in section 2.2) and as a way of doing Kantian ethics.

According to O’Neill, it is a great mistake to think of the Categorical Imperative (CI) as a superstrong first-order principle for action or super-maxim, that is, as an all-purpose practical decision-procedure or algorithm. On the contrary, the CI is a second-order procedural principle applying universally to first-order maxims. Negatively described, the CI is a filter for screening out bad maxims; positively described, the CI is a constructive protocol for correctly generating maxims, given the multifarious array of concrete input-materials to practical reasoning, that is, beliefs, desires, habits, personal situation, social-historical context, and so-on. Thus the CI says, roughly:

When it is construed in this way as essentially procedural or constructive, the CI functions not only as a categorically normative first principle of moral reasoning, but also as a categorically normative first principle of logical reasoning:

false. The CI as applied to logical reasoning then says:

1. "Kantian ethics is primarily addressed to concerns we have as rational moral

 

 

agents, as we deliberate conscientiously about what we ought to do."

2. "Moral ‘oughts’ purport to express categorical imperatives or judgments

 

 

based on these …. [and] these express rational constraints on choice that are not grounded in either the need to take necessary means to one’s particular contingent ends or one’s general desire for happiness."

3. "Categorical imperatives and the moral judgments derived from them express

 

 

rational prescriptions in a vocabulary of constraint (‘must’, ‘bound’, ‘obligatory’, ‘duty’, ‘Do it!’) that reflects how recognizing a rational moral requirement is experienced by those (‘imperfect wills’) who know that they can satisfy the requirement but also know that they can and might violate the requirement and choose instead to pursue some conflicting desire-based end."

4. "Moral ‘oughts’ express a deep, self-identifying, and inescapable disposition

 

 

of moral agents, who have reason and autonomy of will, to acknowledge certain considerations as overridingly authoritative and so internally binding."

5. "It is a fundamental moral principle that humanity in each person is to be

 

 

regarded as an end in itself."

6. "We can think of the policies and acts that would be acceptable for everyone,

1. "When thinking from a practical moral perspective rather than an empirical

 

 

scientific perspective, we conceive typical human actions as done intentionally--for reasons--by agents presumed capable of choosing to act differently."

2. "In human beings, practical judgments and feelings are not usually

10. Conclusion

Despite the sobering fact that the two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century--as someone wittily wrote about the history of the 19^th century--began with Great Expectations but ended with Lost Illusions, a positive moral can nevertheless be extracted from this otherwise downbeat story. Both analytic philosophy and phenomenology could renew themselves in the 21^st century by critically recovering their Kantian origins, and by re-thinking and re-building their own foundations in the light of this critical recovery.

What I mean is this. Analytic philosophers could directly engage with Kant’s two revolutionary ideas (i) that natural science is ultimately all about the intrinsic structures and causal functions of a directly humanly perceivable macrophysical empirical reality, not about microphysical noumena and their humanly unobservable non-relational essences (this is what I called Kant’s manifest realism), and (ii) that the exact sciences presuppose and are inherently constrained by rational human nature, and all theoretical reasoning including pure logic and mathematics is categorically normative at its basis, because practical rationality is explanatorily and ontologically prior to theoretical rationality (let us call this the priority of practical reason over theoretical reason). Correspondingly, phenomenologists could also directly engage with Kant’s equally revolutionary ideas (i) that inner sense (temporal phenomenal consciousness) and outer sense (spatial embodied consciousness) are necessarily interdependent, and (ii) that the intentionality of the mind is continuous with biological life. So phenomenologists could face up to the thoughts that there is no such thing as an ontologically independent, epistemically infallible, world-constituting Cartesian/Kantian transcendental ego, and that the rational human mind is nothing more and nothing less than the activating form of the living human animal fully embedded in its worldly environment and fully engaged in all its ordinary practices.

In these ways, it seems at least possible that the seemingly unbridgeable explanatory and ontological gaps that opened up in mid- and late-twentieth century philosophy between the basic subject matters of post-Quinean analysis (that is, the noumenal micro-world described by mathematical physics) and classical phenomenology (that is, consciousness or subjective experience, and intentionality) could ultimately close themselves up and become a single integrated set of facts about rational human animals and their macrophysical world. If so, this would in effect solve the Two Images Problem without in any way reducing or eliminating the manifest image.

Kant dealt with essentially the same clash of fundamental philosophical images under the rubrics of nature and freedom. And in this way a partial anticipation of Kant’s strategy for integrating the two images can be found in Kantian ethics. Here the indissoluble fusion of the concepts of (i) mind as the embodied locus of cognitive, affective, and volitional capacities, (ii) intentional action, (iii) basic human practices (including language and exact science), (iv) the sharp modal distinction between instrumental or hypothetical normativity and non-instrumental or categorical normativity, (v) logic as the non-instrumentally or categorically normative science of theoretical rationality, and (vi) constructivist moral theory as the non-instrumentally or categorically normative science of practical rationality, aptly captures the sense in which the analytic and phenomenological traditions could together rejoin, reformulate, and recover Kant’s notion of philosophy as a self-critical rational anthropology (JL 9:25-26).

So it appears--to echo the opening lines of the first Critique--that 21^st century philosophy has the peculiar fate, that either it will eventually achieve genuine autonomy as a form of rational anthropology in the Kantian sense, more or less along the lines projected by Kantian ethics, or else it will inwardly perish and become no more than a sub-department of the exact sciences. But the fateful choice between the two options is entirely up to us.