On Natural and Transcendental Illusions in a Kantian-Pragmatist Philosophical Anthropology
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Sami Pihlström
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.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Transcendental Arguments and the Sources of Value: Constitutivism as Critical Realism
- On Natural and Transcendental Illusions in a Kantian-Pragmatist Philosophical Anthropology
- Kantian vs. Platonic: The Ambiguity of Schopenhauer’s Notion of Ideas Explained via Its Origins
- The Nature and Status of Concepts in Phenomenology
- Psychophysiological Transcendentalism in Friedrich Albert Lange’s Social and Political Philosophy
- Book Reviews
- Brandon C. Look.: Leibniz and Kant
- Matthew Rukgaber, Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770
- Peter Antich, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Knowledge, Athens OH: Ohio UP, 2021, pp. 264, ISBN 978-0-8214-2432-2 (hbk) $95.00.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Transcendental Arguments and the Sources of Value: Constitutivism as Critical Realism
- On Natural and Transcendental Illusions in a Kantian-Pragmatist Philosophical Anthropology
- Kantian vs. Platonic: The Ambiguity of Schopenhauer’s Notion of Ideas Explained via Its Origins
- The Nature and Status of Concepts in Phenomenology
- Psychophysiological Transcendentalism in Friedrich Albert Lange’s Social and Political Philosophy
- Book Reviews
- Brandon C. Look.: Leibniz and Kant
- Matthew Rukgaber, Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770
- Peter Antich, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Knowledge, Athens OH: Ohio UP, 2021, pp. 264, ISBN 978-0-8214-2432-2 (hbk) $95.00.
