| This is a preparatory work. My original intention was to write a thesis relating to my main interest, namely the transformation of philosophy into science or the idea of a "science of philosophy," as articulated in Schelling and Hegel. But as I found that the latter's concepts of "science" were the result of a transformation/completion of Kant's position--transcendental idealism (T.I.)--I realized that I needed first to go back to Kant to obtain a clearer understanding of his standpoint.;The final form of my dissertation was the result of two factors: (1) my director's interest in Allison, Strawson and other Anglo-American Kant interpreters, and (2) my gradually coming to see, as a result of studying Kant's Critique in conjunction with the writings of his followers, both what the true meaning of T.I. is, and that the Anglo-American interpreters have missed Kant's point and appear to be entangled in "transcendental realism." Briefly, T.I. is the teaching that mind and universe, subject and object (of experience), the representation and object, are in reality one and inseparable, the object does not exist independently of experience. That is: the world is empirically real yet transcendentally ideal; the world has a being "for us" but not "in itself"; the "in itself" (or object) is only an "in itself for consciousness.".;On the transcendental level and in truth, the world of objects is ideal (does not exist independently of the self), but on the empirical level (which ignores the conditions of experience) the world is ("considered as") real (independent of self). Thus T.I. concerns a fundamental yet necessary "ILLUSION" (the world's independent existence) and its overcoming or exposure through transcendental investigation.;In Chapters One, Two and Three, I develop and defend my interpretation of T.I. by textual analysis of Kant's Critique. In Chapter Four, I evaluate the T.I. interpretations of Allison, Strawson, and W. Waxman, showing they are unaware of the "illusion" at issue in T.I., as insisting on the (spatio-temporal, physical) object's independent existence. In particular I argue that Allison mistakenly posits a separation between the object and our mode of representation and employs an uncritical "re-presentational model" to interpret the Kantian relation between inner and outer sense--the Transcendental Deduction being regarded a failure. Finally in Chapter Five, I give a concise exposition of Hegel's "version" of T.I. as presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit.;I also include an appendix with a summary of Fichte's "version" of T.I. My work on the "science of philosophy" will be preceded by an expanded version of my thesis to be entitled, " thinspace 'The Standpoint,' In Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.". |
