Gironi Fabio - The legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux: analytic and continental Kantianism

FABIO GIRONI

JAMES R. OSHEA

AUDE BANDINI

RAY BRASSIER

CARL SACHS

ANNA LONGO

DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS

GABRIEL CATREN

JOSEPH COHEN

MUHANNAD HARIRI

DANIEL SACILOTTO

This collection has its origin in a conference that I organized in June 2016, at University College Dublin. This event was made possible by an Irish Research Council New Foundation Grant, as well as UCDs own Seed Funding scheme. I want to express particular gratitude to David Markwell, Conor Morris, and Helen Kenny, without whose selfless help I would have never managed to stay on top of everything, nor to cut all the cheeses and salami in time.

Gabriel Catren

In what follows we shall propose a characterization of speculative philosophy in terms of a twofold extension of transcendental philosophy. According to this stance, speculative philosophyfar from being possible in spite of transcendental philosophyis a natural outcome of the latter, resulting from its internal structure. We shall argue that transcendental philosophyunderstood as a theory of the transcendental constitution of objectivityrequires such a twofold extension because it lacks both a diachronic transcendental reflection on the processes of the institution, genesis or emergence of the transcendental subjects and (if we concede that this might not be contradictory with the very spirit of transcendental philosophy) a doctrine of a post-critical science of what we shall initially call the things in themselves. This program is prescribed by a diagnostic according to which transcendental philosophy does not tackle the symmetric problems of thinking the pre-subjective realm on this side of the constituting subject and the trans-objective realm beyond the constituted object, realms that demarcate, from both sides, the subject-object correlation addressed by transcendental philosophy. The hypothesis of this work is that these two speculative supplements of transcendental philosophythe theorization of the pre-subjective realm from (and in) which the institution of transcendental subjects takes place and a post-critical science of the things in themselves presuppose each other in the sense that we could not add one without the other one. It follows then, that the twofold speculative extension of transcendental philosophy that we propose is self-consistent.

Let us start with one of the most basic phenomenological facts, namely that we are always already embedded in (what we shall call) an experiential field in which experience is always perspectival , which means that we only have access to aspects, profiles, faces, or adumbrations of phenomena. This empirical perspectivism of experience results from the fact that the experiential field unfolds in extensions (such as spatiotemporal extension) in which every possible subject is always located in a particular state (where by state we mean for instance its spatiotemporal position and its state of motion). We could then say that experience is always correlated to the subjects state.

According to the infinite regulative idea of science, scientific knowledge has to be objective, that is to say valid for any subject independent of its particular state. But how could we go beyond the empirical perspectivism of experience and construct subject-independent descriptions and explanations of the different natural phenomena? The answer is (at least formally) simple: there is a well-defined protocol that makes possible the transition from empirical perspectivism to objectivity, namely one that performs variations of the standpoint of observation. By performing variations, we can integrate a multiplicity of adumbrations, constitute the corresponding multifaceted object, and identify the objective properties that remain invariant under these variations (properties that can then be used to characterize the object in a subject-independent manner).