Empirical Realism and the Great Outdoors: A Critique of Meillassoux
Empirical Realism and the Great Outdoors: A Critique of Meillassoux
Meillassoux argues that Kant’s ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being prevents an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. This chapter examines three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. These charges are rejected on the following grounds: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it.
Keywords: Meillassoux, Kant, Cartesian, transcendental reality, correlationism, transcendental idealism, ancestral statement, necessity, causality
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