Adaptive Design, Contingency, and Ontological Principles for Limited Beings

Transcendental arguments are not popular in contemporary philosophy of science. They are typically seen as antinaturalistic and incapable of providing explanatory force in accounting for natural phenomena. However, when viewed as providing (certain types of) intelligibility to complicated concepts used in scientific reasoning, a concrete and productive role is recoverable for transcendental reasoning in philosophy of science. In this article I argue that the resources, and possibly the need, for such a role are available within a thoroughly naturalistic framework garnered from the work of Hasok Chang and William Wimsatt.

Reconsidering Kant’s Rejection of Indirect Arguments in Transcendental Philosophy

Immanuel Kant states that indirect arguments are not suitable for the purposes of transcendental philosophy. If he is correct, this affects contemporary versions of transcendental arguments which are often used as an indirect refutation of scepticism. I discuss two reasons for Kant’s rejection of indirect arguments. Firstly, Kant argues that we are prone to misapply the law of excluded middle in philosophical contexts. Secondly, Kant points out that indirect arguments lack some explanatory power. They can show that something is true but they do not provide insight into why something is true. Using mathematical proofs as examples, I show that this is because indirect arguments are non-constructive. From a Kantian point of view, transcendental arguments need to be constructive in some way. In the last part of the paper, I briefly examine a comment made by P. F. Strawson. In my view, this comment also points toward a connection between transcendental and constructive reasoning.

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

Human

The fifth chapter turns to Nietzsche’s analysis of the distinctively “human” values that our species has superimposed upon bodily values. It treats the innovation that most made us human: what we call our “agency.” Our conceptions of ourselves as subjects and agents are largely mistaken, but the very thinking of ourselves in these ways makes a key difference. Nietzsche here develops a naturalistic alternative to Kant’s transcendental arguments: positing ourselves as agents is not a possibility-condition but a life-condition. We examine his account of the genealogy and functions of this self-conception. It makes us able to use a new kind of value-sign, which we steer by consciously. This human valuing also presumes that its values should be “true”—should be grounded in reasons and not just in what we happen to want. This demand gives humans truth as a kind of meta-value competing with the deeper bodily value of power.

Constitutionalism and transcendental arguments

In his A Theory of Legal Argumentation, Robert Alexy lists four modes of justification for his rules of practical discourse. Of these, the only one that to him seems to have a true foundationalist capability is Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic mode of justification. But there is another strategy, which Alexy calls 'definitional', based on the concept of language game, that seems to have been employed by Ronald Dworkin, in his 'Objectivity and truth. You’d better believe it', in order to reject moral scepticism. In this paper I will argue that these two modes of justification can be traced back, from a logical and genealogical perspective, to one form of argument, the transcendental argument. But I will also argue that there is a peculiar circularity in the way this kind of argument develops, a circularity possibly ascribable to certain idealising presuppositions.