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
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
