Abstract
The covid-19 pandemic and the increasingly polarized political situation in many countries today have highlighted the significance of various humanly natural intellectual mistakes, cognitive biases, and widespread inferential errors. This essay examines, at a philosophical meta-level, the relation between our natural epistemic errors and the kind of humanly unavoidable transcendental illusion analyzed by Immanuel Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic of the First Critique. While both kinds of illusion are usually primarily discussed in an epistemological context, my approach is not exclusively epistemic. Rather, my main argument extends the broadly Kantian critique of reason – as a critical via negativa focusing on what is epistemically “wrong” about us, as the kind of cognitive agents we human beings naturally are – into a pragmatically enriched investigation of “the negative” as constitutive of the human condition, that is, our lack of sufficiently critical epistemic and ethical capacities, including our propensity to both cognitive error and moral evil. Our being inescapably inclined to manifest such negativities in our epistemic and ethical lives, and our insufficient awareness of doing so, are, arguably, “transcendental facts” about us, to be critically examined in terms of a Kantian-cum-pragmatist philosophical anthropology. This significantly enriches our picture of transcendental philosophy.
References
Allison, H. E. 1997. “We Can Act Only under the Idea of Freedom.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71 (2): 39–50.10.2307/3130940Search in Google Scholar
Allison, H. E. 2004 [1983]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense – Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.10.2307/j.ctt1cc2kjcSearch in Google Scholar
Byrne, P. 2007. Kant on God. Aldershot: Ashgate.Search in Google Scholar
Grier, M. 2001. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511498145Search in Google Scholar
Grier, M. 2018 [2004]. “Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/kant-metaphysics/.Search in Google Scholar
Hanna, R. 2001. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Search in Google Scholar
James, W. 1975 [1907]. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, edited by F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers and I. K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. 2012 [2011]. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London and New York: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar
Kant, I. 1990 [1781=A/1787=B]. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. edited by R. Schmidt. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.Search in Google Scholar
Kant, I. 1983 [1790]. “Kritik der Urteilskraft.” In Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. 8, edited by W. Weischedel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.10.28937/978-3-7873-2069-1Search in Google Scholar
Kant, I. 1983 [1793–94]. “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft.” In Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. 7, edited by W. Weischedel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.10.28937/978-3-7873-3317-2Search in Google Scholar
Kant, I. 1983 [1800]. “Logik.” In Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. 5, edited by W. Weischedel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Search in Google Scholar
Kivistö, S. 2014. The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004276451Search in Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. 1970 [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Madore, J. 2011. Difficult Freedom and Radical Evil in Kant. London and New York: Bloomsbury.Search in Google Scholar
McIntyre, L. 2018. Post-truth. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/11483.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
O’Neill, O. 1989. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
O’Neill, O. 1992. “Vindicating Reason.” In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, edited by P. Guyer, 280–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CCOL0521365872.010Search in Google Scholar
Peirce, C. S. 1992 [1877]. “The Fixation of Belief.” In The Essential Peirce, 1, edited by N. Houser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Pihlström, S. 2003. Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View. Amherst, NY: Prometheus / Humanity Books.Search in Google Scholar
Pihlström, S. 2009. Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology. London: Continuum.Search in Google Scholar
Pihlström, S. 2013. Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. New York: Fordham University Press.10.5422/fordham/9780823251582.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Pihlström, S. 2021. Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age: Sincerity, Normativity, and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781009047142Search in Google Scholar
Popper, K. R. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.10.1063/1.3050617Search in Google Scholar
Renaut, A. 1998. “Transzendentale Dialektik, Einleitung und Buch I.” German trans. Dunja Jaber In Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by G. Mohr and M. Willaschek, 353–70. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.10.1524/9783050050386.353Search in Google Scholar
Vanden Auweele, D. 2019. Pessimism in Kant’s Ethics and Rational Religion. Lanham: Lexington.Search in Google Scholar
Verburgt, J. 2015 [2012]. “Dialectic.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Kant, edited by G. Banham, D. Schulting, and N. Hems, 195–7. London & New York: Bloomsbury.Search in Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston