Abstract

The relationship between anti-realism and epistemology, a much discussed topic in analytic philosophy, has also been central to continental thought. My analysis follows the development of this theme, showing how post-modernism emerges as the fitting conclusion of a coherent evolution. Kant opens the issue by claiming that many features of reality which seem independent of human experience are actually contributed by us. The stability and intelligibility of reality, i.e. the possibility of intersubjective knowledge, then depends upon a conception of the self as a determinate, unchanging set of experience-organizing processes. The self must remain constant across time and cultures in order to produce homogeneous phenomena. Hegel, Nietzsche, and early Heidegger develop this line of thought, each eroding further the vestigial remains of realism: noumenal reality and an ahistorical, essential self. ;In his later work, Heidegger becomes the first thinker to break completely with a reality behind phenomena and a human essence which persists unchanging through history. Without transcendent reality to serve as a standard of correctness, truth becomes simply appearance or unconcealment. This represents the culmination of the increasing anti-realism I have traced from Kant to early Heidegger. Foucault then gives Heidegger's historicist dissolution of the self greater historical detail and an ethical twist