The Problem of "The World"

Abstract

Contemporary analytic philosophy abounds with invocations of something called ‘the world’ (or ‘reality’); but it is none too clear what is meant by ‘the world’ in those invocations. This book shows that in case after case—ranging from the metaphysics of magnitudes, through cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of language, all the way to metaethics—those making invocations of ‘the world’ take themselves to be talking about the world as captured or reflected in our objective representations, when those representations are true. At the same time, however, they take that world—as thus captured or reflected—to be altogether independent of our representations of it, and hence independent as well of the conditions under which those representations have whatever sense they have for us. These philosophers thus reveal themselves as transcendental realists, in Kant’s sense. Drawing on Kant, but revising and expanding his ideas under the inspiration of (the Later) Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, Merleau-Ponty, and Stanley Cavell, this book argues that transcendental realism ultimately amounts to no more than an empty gesture; and it argues for a form of transcendental idealism, which, in a way, is just the recognition and acknowledgement of transcendental realism’s emptiness, but also has a positive upshot: in bringing out the emptiness of transcendental realism, it reveals our sense-making as conditioned, and shows that, and how, philosophers get themselves in philosophical trouble when they try to hold on to sense apart from its (worldly-historical) conditions.