This paper argues that the critical doctrine of the necessary unity of the thinking subject propounded in Kant’s Second Paralogism contains an idealist commitment to the metaphysically exceptional nature of the unifying activity of thought. Rather than rejecting Kant’s transcendental framework as necessarily idealist and antagonistic to the current projects of speculative materialism, it is argued that transcendental philosophy should remain an important ingredient of any contemporary metaphysics. The implicit metaphysical idealism of Kantian critical idealism, it is claimed, (...) in the end reveals speculative resources within the architecture of transcendental philosophy that can, if I am right, maintain the importance of the project of determining the epistemological legitimacy of metaphysical knowledge without reducing metaphysics to the subjective idealism of Kantian critical philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBritish Idealism was the philosophical school which dominated during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Using the ideas of Bernard Bosanquet, John Caird and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison as an illustration, this paper looks at some of the ways in which the British Idealists sought to develop new and more subtle conceptions of the transcendent, able to resist the corrosive effects of late nineteenth-century critical and naturalistic thinking. The paper concludes by looking at three fields – philosophy, theology (...) and literature – in which it is possible to discern the ongoing influence into the first half of the twentieth century of their efforts. (shrink)

Le problème posé par Cette communication est celui de savoir si l’argument des vérités éternelles, sous la forme qu’il revêt dans les systèmes idéalistes en vue de prouver l’existence de Dieu, est réellement capable d’établir cette existence. Il semble que la réponse ne puisse être que négative, pour cette raison que l’idéalisme est impuissant à donner un sens authentique à la notion de transcendance exigée par l’argument des vérités éternelles. Si bien qu’en fin de compte, cet argument n’aboutit, dans le (...) contexte idéaliste, qu’à hypostasier indûment les formes subjectives de notre structure mentale, — ce qui ajoute à la disgrâce logique du postulat gratuit, celle d’un réalisme peu intelligible. Cette discussion amène à mettre en lumière les conditions auxquelles l’argument des vérités éternelles aura tout son sens et toute sa portée. (shrink)

Each well-known proposed solution to the mind-body problem encounters an impasse. These take the form of an explanatory gap, such as the one between mental and physical, or between micro-subjects and macro-subject. The dialectical pressure to bridge these gaps is generating positions in which consciousness is becoming increasingly foundational. The most recent of these, cosmopsychism, typically casts the entire cosmos as a perspectival subject whose mind grounds those of more limited subjects like ourselves. I review the dialectic from materialism and (...) dualism through to panpsychism, suggesting that explanatory gaps in the latter stem from assuming foundational consciousness to be perspectival. Its renunciation may yield the notion of an aperspectival, universal, “non-dual” consciousness that grounds all manifestation and is unstructured by subject, object or any differentia. Not only is such consciousness suggestive of a natural successor to cosmopsychism, but it has also been reported to be the direct experience of mystics who claim to have transcended the individual perspective. Their purported insight — that our aperspectival conscious nature is identical to the ground of all being — has been termed “the Perennial Philosophy”. Believing this Perennial Philosophy to offer the most promising way forward in the mind-body problem, I construct from it the foundations of a metaphysical system that I call “Perennial Idealism”. This attempts to account for manifestation in terms of dispositional, imagery-bound subjects. I then address an age-old “Parmenidean” conundrum that I refer to as “the problem of the one and the many”: How can an undifferentiated substratum ground differentia without the ground itself differentiating? The proposed solution takes its cue from mystico-philosophical writings in the Advaita Vedānta tradition, known as the ajāta doctrine. (shrink)

Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. She argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. Kant is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he (...) does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. On Allais's account, we cannot understand Kant's idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: she understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. This enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the incompatibility of three claims, each of them quite attractive to a theist. First, the doctrine of deep dependence: the universe depends for its existence, in a non-causal way, on God. Second, the doctrine of true transcendence: the universe is wholly distinct from God; God is separate and apart from the universe in respect of mereology, modes, and mentality. Third, the doctrine of robust creaturely freedom: some creature performs some act such that he could (...) have done other than he in fact did. After laying out the claims, I show that their conjunction has its adherents—most clearly, the medieval Jewish philosopher, Maimonides. I then argue in detail that the claims are in fact incompatible. I conclude with a discussion of which of the claims is best jettisoned, drawing in part on the work of the Absolute Idealist, Mary Calkins. (shrink)

Several alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason (...) for this is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology. (shrink)

Idealism is a sticky doctrine. Each of us believes that there are lots of things existing and taking place beyond our actual or possible knowledge. Yet we have to live with the predicament that we cannot put our finger on any one such item without somehow touching it with our language and mind. Even our imagination seems to suffer from this incurable ambivalence between self-containment and self-transcendence.

''The problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time. " I Needless to say, Transcendence was a particularly lively i~sue when Karl Heim wrote these words in the mid-1930's. Within the province of philosophi cal theology and philosophy of religion, however, it is always the prob lem, as Gordon Kaufman has recently reminded us. 2Por the question concerning the nature and the reality of Transcendence has not only to do with self-transcendence, but with the being of Transcendence-Itself, that is (...) to say, with the nature and the reality of God as experienced and understood at any given time or place. Now there are those today who would claim that any further discus sion of the latter half of this proposition, namely,Transcendence-Itse1f or God, is worthless and quite beside the point. Such persons would claim that the particular logia represented by the theological sciences has collapsed by virtue of its object having disappeared. Indeed, when one surveys the contemporary scene in philosophy and theology, there is a good deal of evidence that this is the case':"" theology of late having be come something of a "spectacle," to use Pritz Buri's term. One of the reasons for this, we here contend, is that the richness and the diversity of the meaning of Transcendence has been lost. And even though we do not here intend to resolve the issue, neither do we assume that such an enqui ry is either impossible or irrelevant. (shrink)

Macmurray provides a conceptual and personal reference point around which we can locate a tradition of social humanism that unfolds from the British idealists to the communitarians. Some communitarian themes appear in the thought of the idealists: these include a vitalist analysis of behaviour, a 'thick' view of the person, and a positive concept of freedom defined in relation to others. Macmurray developed these themes and introduced others largely as a result of reworking idealism so as to come to (...) terms with the crisis of reason associated with the First World War. He rejected objective idealism with its concept of absolute mind for a personal idealism that incorporated an action-based metaphysics. Doing so prompted him to adopt other communitarian themes: these include an appeal to friendship and love, a contrast between society and community, and an appeal to religion to transcend the limits of justice. While contemporary communitarians have inherited much from philosophers such as Macmurray, they have also developed the tradition of social humanism. Philosophers such as Sandel, Taylor and Walzer have done so through grappling with the implications of multiculturalism for the idea of a cosmopolitan community. Ethical socialists like Tony Blair and Raymond Plant have done so through grappling with issues such as a decline in solidarity as it influences the welfare state. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin’s subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity—figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. Kant moralized the (...) notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species—so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant’s notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling’s account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study to provide a structured interpretation of the significance of Michael Oakeshott's critique of the Enlightenment. By seeing the thinker as a 'sceptical idealist’ posing a serious challenge to the intellectual positions informed by the Enlightenment, this book attempts to resolve some of the issues debated by Oakeshott scholars. The author argues that Oakeshott’s famous critique of philosophisme and Rationalism in fact expresses a sense of the crisis of philosophical modernity. Moreover, notwithstanding some recent interpretations, (...) throughout his intellectual career Oakeshott has never altered his analysis of these two themes: philosophy as the persistent re-establishment of completeness by transcending abstractness, and the modes of experience as self-consistent worlds of discourse. To apply this philosophy in his moral and political writings, Oakeshott has redressed an imbalance in favour of the Enlightenment ethical position — ‘the sovereignty of technique’, ‘demonstrative moral truth’, ’the politics of faith’ and ‘enterprise association’ — by revitalising the importance of ‘traditional knowledge’, ‘conversation’, ‘intimation’, ‘the politics of scepticism’ and ‘civil association’. Oakeshott is neither a doctrinal liberal nor a dogmatic conservative, but a philosophical sceptic. Moreover, Oakeshott’s contribution to history not only lies in his effort to transcend the Enlightenment historiographical position — by separating the historical from the naturalised conception of History on which so-called ‘scientific history’ rests — but also in his idealistic solution for the ‘temporal dilemma’ and the ‘epistemic tension’ in history that have long bothered philosophers. (shrink)

It would be easy enough to support the claim that the man who introduced post-Kantian idealism into the French universities did so primarily because he found in this system a way to demonstrate the Spiritualist doctrine which came from Biran, the Eclectics, and particularly from Ravaisson. Idealism, in effect, was to Jules Lachelier more of a premise than a conclusion. Now although it might be true that post-Kantianism had been able to provide the right kind of support for (...) the main Spiritualist beliefs, notably the thesis of the reality of Spirit, its presence in nature, and indeed its primacy over nature, the fact remains, and this is what I shall attempt to show, that this idealism is incompatible with a notion that plays a prominent role in the Spiritualist doctrine: that of the existence of a transcendent God. Here, then, is what I should like to claim: that the same principles which were used to prove the Spiritual nature of both thought and matter should render impossible not only the proof of a transcendent God, but also the mere entertaining of the hypothesis of such a being. (shrink)

It would be easy enough to support the claim that the man who introduced post-Kantian idealism into the French universities did so primarily because he found in this system a way to demonstrate the Spiritualist doctrine which came from Biran, the Eclectics, and particularly from Ravaisson. Idealism, in effect, was to Jules Lachelier more of a premise than a conclusion. Now although it might be true that post-Kantianism had been able to provide the right kind of support for (...) the main Spiritualist beliefs, notably the thesis of the reality of Spirit, its presence in nature, and indeed its primacy over nature, the fact remains, and this is what I shall attempt to show, that this idealism is incompatible with a notion that plays a prominent role in the Spiritualist doctrine: that of the existence of a transcendent God. Here, then, is what I should like to claim: that the same principles which were used to prove the Spiritual nature of both thought and matter should render impossible not only the proof of a transcendent God, but also the mere entertaining of the hypothesis of such a being. (shrink)

Can the Âtman in its infinity and transcendence be made the basis for civil rights? Can we deduce the idea of civil rights and their number from the conception of the Âtman? Can historicity be preserved in the bosom of the Âtman? It has been said that only ideas like that of the dictatorship are possible on the basis of the Âtman as conceived by Indian thinkers. Individual freedom and initiative necessary for new scientific discoveries and inventions are taught by (...) Christ and other Israel-born religions, and the discovery of the atom bomb is due to such ideas. Long ago the late Prof. C.A. Moore of Hawaii urged me several times to handle such criticisms of Indian philosophy and religion. I tried to answer them in some early papers. The most important considerations are: As Kant said, from the highest metaphysical reality it is not logically possible to deduce anything particular or even lower; for instance, we cannot even deduce from “All men are mortal” whether Socrates is or is not mortal, unless we add “Socrates is a man,” which is an empirical statement. And If the Âtman is one and all-comprehensive, no democracy is said to be possible because individual men cannot be real then; but it is overlooked that then nothing is possible, not even trees and stones. Again, if there is only one personal God and if his will is supreme, will he not be a tyrant or a Louis XIV of the heavens, thundering his unquestionable commands? Where do democracy and freedom of the individual go then? On the other hand, if every one is the Supreme Âtman in essence, then everyone is free with all the initiative one can have by birth. Civil rights will then have a metaphysical foundation because every finite individual is inherently one with the Supreme Person and has the same rights and freedom as any king or emperor. But these arguments and counter-arguments cannot impress every one because to deduce anything from the highest Being leads only to antinomies and will be counter-productive in our search for truth. In metaphysics or ontology we can go only from the lower to the higher in logic or discursive thinking, but not vice versa. (shrink)

Since Herbert Hart’s “fresh start” encouraged us to interpret legal and political phenomena from an “internal point of view,” and Lon Fuller pointed out the severe constraints upon a conceptually viable construction of this view, jurisprudence has had little choice but to become, methodologically speaking, genuinely and critically sociological. By this, we mean that in breaking with the common-sensical half-truths which produced the imperative or command theory of law, the conceptual problem of modelling the practical rationale of the legal enterprise (...) for the purposes of a general description of the phenomenon as subject matter, has become central and acute. In the past 20 years or so, the sociological awareness of the need to transcend the flux of empirical subjectivity, as well as important recent reinterpretations of the tradition of Natural Law, does seem to put jurisprudence within striking distance of achieving a mature status of integration with the methodology of the social sciences; not merely as some adjunct to, or opportunity for, empirically oriented “social studies,” but, as the source of a genuine epistemological synthesis in the approach to the problem of conceptualising the very subject matter of social science, namely, social action at the institutional level. In terms of concept formation this has gone some way towards the rehabilitation of the idea of “essential” or “focal” viewpoints in contrast to the enthusiasm for the contingencies and relativity of historical, linguistic and cultural conventionalisms. (shrink)

Plotinus (204-70) is the founder of Neoplatonism and its most significant thinker. He shaped late antique philosophy and significantly influenced the entire metaphysical tradition of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and German Idealism. In this volume, Jens Halfwassen presents Plotinus' life and work, as well as the most important aspects of his historical influence. Issues of key importance for the Neoplatonists-such as the interaction between Being and Thought, the ascent of the soul, and the interpretation of Plato's theory of principles-are (...) explained in detail in the course of outlining the Neoplatonic metaphysical system. The introduction outlines Halfwassen's significant contribution to the study of Plotinus, paying particular attention to the differences between the current German and Anglophone approaches to the Platonic tradition. (shrink)

This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti-realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. The kind of anti-realism associated with Wittgenstein has it that there is no deep sense in which our concepts are answerable to reality. Associated with Putnam is the rejection of four main ideas: theory-independent reality, the idea of a uniquely true theory, a correspondence theory of truth, and bivalence. While there are superficial similarities between both views and Kant's, I (...) find more significant differences. Dummettian anti-realism, too, clearly differs from Kant's position: Kant believes in verification-transcendent reality, and transcendental idealism is not a theory of meaning or truth. However, I argue that part of the Dummettian position is extremely useful for understanding part of Kant's position - his idealism about the appearances of things. I argue that Kant's idealism about appearances can be expressed as the rejection of experience-transcendent reality with respect to appearances. (shrink)

I begin with a defence of both Gyekye’s universalist and African metaphilosophies. In light of these metaphilosophies, I discuss the contemporary Western hegemony of materialist philosophy of mind and its origins in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), showing that the existence and nature of the traditional Akan philosophy, as elaborated by Gyekye, casts serious doubt on some influential founding motivations for materialism. I then argue that traditional Akan philosophy is best aligned with contemporary idealism. Gyekye’s endorsement of (...) dualism is shown to have not been intended as ontologically fundamental, while panpsychism is rejected on the basis of the resistance it offers to the Akan commitment to transcendence. Contemporary idealism, however, is able to accommodate all the main components of traditional Akan philosophy, making both experiential primacy and transcendence central to a metaphysical understanding of reality. Sunsum (spirit) and ōkra (soul) are understood in terms of the distinction between the phenomenal and horizonal conceptions of experience, with consciousness always requiring a distinction between the phenomenal world within an experiential horizon, and the independent being that transcends the horizon. (shrink)

I describe characteristic phenomena of quantum physics that suggest that reality appears to us in two domains: the open and well-known domain of empirical, material things—the realm of actuality—and a hidden and invisible domain of nonempirical, non-material forms—the realm of potentiality. The nonempirical forms are part of physical reality because they contain the empirical possibilities of the universe and can manifest themselves in the empirical world. Two classes of nonempirical states are discussed: the superposition states of microphysical entities, which are (...) nonempirical because observation destroys them, and the virtual states of material systems, which are nonempirical because they are empty. The non-empirical part to physical reality represents a predetermined and hidden order that exists before it is empirical, and the visible world is an emanation out of it. I discuss consequences for our understanding of human nature, the origin of life, and human values. Reality is an indivisible wholeness that is aware of its processes, like a Cosmic Spirit, and it reveals its awareness in the mindlike properties of elementary processes as well as in the human consciousness. Thus, one is led to G. W. F. Hegel's thesis that the Cosmic Spirit is thinking in us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Biographical Encyclopedia of British IdealismKarim DharamsiWilliam Sweet, editor. Biographical Encyclopedia of British Idealism. New York-London: Continuum, 2010. Pp. xx + 724. Cloth, $295.00.The term ‘British Idealism’ underdetermines the interests and geographies of philosophers classed under its heading. It may imply a common goal or, indeed, location. This is misleading. The Biographical Encyclopedia of British Idealism goes a long way in demonstrating the challenge of grouping (...) together philosophers with divergent interests and historical pedigrees, sharing some affiliation with Idealist thinking in Britain from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many transcend so-called Analytic and Continental categories, and if not transcend, certainly sidestep them. William Sweet’s volume is at once an archaeological guide to British Idealism and a guide to its relevance today. The volume excavates deeply hidden contributions to philosophy and may destabilize our customary assumptions about the geographical limits of Western philosophy; the contributors to the volume ask readers to extend their community of interest to scholars from Southern Africa, India, and East Asia. Calling philosophers working in India and East Asia “British” is also an important reminder; it has its obvious links to British imperium while at the same time speaking to the influence of Idealist thinking outside the frame of colonial England to thinkers working outside the canonical disputes of Western philosophy.This massive volume, uncompromisingly detailed and comprehensive, does have the elements of a survey, but this is not its intent, nor does one get this impression on reading its entries. This Encyclopedia aims to historically and philosophically contextualize Idealist thought. The first six chapters do just this. They are “Idealism in Britain” (William Sweet); “Idealism in Australia and New Zealand” (Mark Weblin); “The Impact of Idealism in North America” (Leslie Armour); “British Idealism in Southern Africa” (William Sweet); “British Idealism in India” (William Sweet); and “British Idealism in East Asia” (William Sweet). [End Page 146] The remainder of the volume includes entries on well-known Idealist philosophers, lesser known thinkers, and important critics of Idealist philosophy, including the familiar and highly influential Russell and Moore. I will say a little bit about the excellent chapter on British Idealism in India.While readers may have familiarity with Idealism in North America and Britain, it may come as a surprise to learn that Indian philosophers, influenced by a great deal of British philosophy, were particularly keen on Idealism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sweet provides readers with a short history of Indian higher education and the place, for instance, of Kant and Hegel in the philosophy curriculum throughout India in the late nineteenth century; it was not long after that British Idealists were being taught to students in Bombay (Mumbai), Madras, and Calcutta (still important centres of higher education in India) along with Allahabad, Mysore, Pondicherry, and Amalner. Idealists in India, much like their counterparts in Britain, labored beyond academic philosophy, extending their discussions to questions of nationalism in India and contributing to ideas in social and political thought.The attraction of British Idealism (indeed, any “Western” Idealist philosophy) to Indian intellectuals may seem mysterious to some readers. Sweet maintains that Indian philosophy was and is by its own historical sense idealist and so the British variant was not so much as “imported” as finding a natural home. Sweet thinks that the revival of interest in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta can be reasonably traced to the influence of British Idealism’s place in Indian philosophy. There is little dispute that Kant, Hegel, and the British thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced how Indian philosophers understood the discipline’s Western identity and aims. Indian philosophers had begun to enter discussions belonging to another history. Hiralal Halder’s Hegelianism and Human Personality, published in 1910, and Ras-Vihari Das’s doctoral dissertation of 1930, The Self and the Ideal, could easily be taken as titles of works in Western European or North American libraries. Philosophy no doubt includes philosophers who come from many histories, and the discipline may be resistant to simple geographical reduction.Sweet cautions readers that Indian philosophers contributed to the development of Indian philosophical thought; they were not merely expositors... (shrink)

AT MID-CENTURY, MOST PHILOSOPHICAL ROUTES to transcendence appeared closed. Philosophers and theologians often cooperated in associating transcendence with dubious metaphysics, the otherworldly and the supernatural. This attitude towards transcendence was captured most sharply perhaps, in the work of the logical positivists, but it was shared for different reasons by the positivists of revelation. The rebirth of idealism in British and American philosophy of religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been widely succeeded by realism and naturalism (...) of the kind that, with some exceptions, tended to be indifferent, if not openly hostile to philosophical and theological talk of transcendent reality. Between the wars, metaphysical utterances were condemned by the logical positivists and their immediate successors to the scrap heap of the non-cognitive. Kerygmatic theologians, with their emphasis upon the ontological difference of transcendence and their appeal to the authority of revelation and faith, joined hands with the philosophers in ruling out any connecting point between transcendence and immanence, between the sacred and the secular in the ordinary experience of persons. The positivists of revelation no less than the logical positivists conferred an independence upon the world. Transcendent reality was reduced either to the non-cognitive, or to the miracle of faith and revelation. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt to develop late Professor K. Satchidananda Murty’s quest to articulate Immanent and Transcendent in his philosophical journey from Upanishads to German idealism and Marxism. It is proposed to be achieved by explicating Murty’s understanding of the views of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx on human condition and its transcendence or emancipation. For this purpose, I will discuss consciousness as the ultimate reality being transcendent and immanent in Vedanta as well as in (...) German idealism. The ambition and challenge of the present article is to pursue Murty’s cross-cultural perspective to the extent that the ideas of thinkers of very different traditions, especially culturally and intellectually distinct traditions, are contested on the fullness of thought concerning immanent and transcendent as is evident in comparing Sankara, Kant, and Hegel on consciousness in relation to Buddha and Marx on suffering and alienation. Whereas Murty refers to them, from cross-cultural perspective, with limited end to substantiate his position on the “realm between” derived from Upanishads and Vedanta infused with Buddhism, I wish to present, from the same perspective, some clarifications, annotations, and summations from German idealism and Marxism, which may be useful for expanding Murty’s preliminary acquaintance with them. I wish to argue that though there is antithetical nature of these perspectives, yet the distinctions between immanent and transcendent have been one of the fundamental conceptual linkages under different cultural background. (shrink)

Sur le modèle des représentations et des propositions en soi de Bolzano, Husserl a envisagé les significations comme des unités idéales-objectives qui sont accessibles à plusieurs consciences et qui perdurent au-delà des actes psychiques passagers dans lesquels elles se réalisent. Indépen­dantes des opérations subjectives, les unités sémantiques seraient donc transcendantes, c’est-à-dire extérieures à la conscience. Cependant, en posant la subjectivité transcendantale comme un absolu par rapport auquel tout objet, réel ou idéal, se définit, la phénoménologie transcendantale-constitutive est finalement incapable de (...) rendre compte de cette transcendance dont elle nie le caractère absolu au profit de la conscience : une fois que les unités de sens sont définies comme des formations logiques issues de l’activité catégoriale, leur « transcendance » n’est plus qu’un sens d’être intention­nellement constitué. Dès lors, peut-on expliquer la « transcen­dance » des unités de sens, sans vider ce concept de son contenu essentiel, sans retirer aux significations leur indépendance et leur extériorité vis-à-vis de la conscience ? L’hypothèse la plus simple consisterait à dire qu’avant de traduire la manière dont les objets sont représentés par la conscience, les significations conceptuelles sont liées aux propriétés que la pensée a arra­chées à leurs substrats pour en faire des marques distinctives. Mais cet ancrage ontologique soulève à son tour de multiples difficultés, si bien que Husserl, pour expliquer la transcendance des significations sans contrevenir à ses principes idéalistes, n’a pas d’autre choix que d’invoquer un ancrage linguistique : une fois consignées dans des signes extérieurs, les pensées sortent de la sphère privée, acquièrent une extériorité, une publicité et une solidité en vertu desquelles elles se conservent au-delà des vécus passagers, et sont à tout moment accessibles à toute conscience. Cependant, si le langage commun apparaît, pour les consciences, comme l’ultime condition de possibilité de la transcendance des significations, il n’en demeure pas moins que la transcendance qui leur revient avant qu’elles ne soient exprimées — car pour Husserl les significations, dont l’unité s’oppose à la multiplicité des signes susceptibles de les transcrire, ne sont pas nécessaire­ment exprimées — demeure un postulat métaphysique qui pourrait bien s’effondrer avec l’hypothèse d’une traductibilité translinguistique du sens qui lui sert de corollaire. (shrink)

Damian Byers analyzes the form Husserl gives to the problem of knowledge—the way this form influences the development of the phenomenological method, and the results of its application. In a very clear fashion, Byers presents Husserl’s understanding of the roles of intentionality, idealism, temporalization, and kinesthesia in the constitution of knowledge. Drawing upon all of Husserl’s major texts, he corrects many misapprehensions about Husserl’s doctrines of intentionality and idealism. Byers argues that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is both a philosophy (...) of closure and control and a philosophy of openness and vulnerability. (shrink)

Since the ages of the Old Testament, the Homeric myths, the tragedies of Sophocles and the ensuing theological speculations of the Christian millennium, the theme of loneliness has dominated and haunted the Western world. In this wide-ranging book, philosopher Ben Lazare Mijuskovic returns us to our rich philosophical past on the nature of consciousness, lived experience, and the pining for a meaningful existence that contemporary social science has displaced in its tendency toward material reduction. Engaging key metaphysical discussions on causality, (...) space, time, subjectivity, the mind body-problem, personal identity, freedom, religion, and transcendence in ancient, scholastic, modern, and contemporary philosophy, he highlights the phenomenology of loneliness that lies at the very core of being human. In challenging psychoanalytic and neuroscientific paradigms, Mijuskovic argues that isolative existence and self-consciousness is not so much of a problem of unconscious conflict or the need for psychopharmacology as it is the loss of a sense of personal intimacy. The issue of the criteria of "personal identity" in relation to loneliness has long engaged and consumed the interest of theologians, ethicists, philosophers, novelists and psychologists. This book will be of great interests to academics and students of the humanities, and all those with an interest in the philosophy of loneliness.. (shrink)

This article investigates an intertwined systematic and historical view on theories of matter. It follows an approach brought forward by Hermann Weyl around 1925, applies it to recent theories of matter in physics (including geometrodynamics and quantum gravity), and embeds it into a more general philosophical framework. First, I shall discuss the physical and philosophical problems of a unified field theory on the basis of Weyl's own abandonment of his 1918 ‘pure field theory’ in favour of an ‘agent theory’ of (...) matter. The difference between agent and field theories of matter is then used to establish a sort of dialectic meta-view. With reference to Weyl this view can be understood as being a particular Fichtean transcendental idealist approach which attempts to combine the strengths of the Husserlian phenomenology and Cassirer's neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

People's desire not to limit the meaning of Hancang driving force, continuous development and self-transcendence, which is people from within and beyond the root driving force. The so-called "inner beyond" is not a process of idealism, which began with the desire, from the bottom of the body, and go up on the layer by layer through the heart of the development process裡and mental flexibility, and would therefore have to enhance and transform. We regard the body as I desire the (...) presence of mode. Significance by the driving force in the body and thus close to the appearance, at first non-verbal, and then eventually completed in the language of representation. Through a variety of different non-linguistic representation, the meaning of the body of the driving force to obtain specific and differentiation, as music, art, dance, drama art form ... ... and so on. These different forms of art of common origins, is made ​​to understand the forms of physical exercise, as they are each other's differences, then is made ​​to understand the form of different, such as voice, image, attitude ... ... and so the nature and rules lawyers, and the rise because of their differences on the artistic and cultural expressions of different, and even the formation of the various arts precinct. In order to film art integrated voice, image and body movement, presented at the time of the current moving image, to the above description of the story. Different types of art is "the desire of the induced mover", which provides clear instructions and guidance In order to man the desire for meaning. The meaning of desire is the driving force of development of art in different fields to cross-border basic driving force. Story has entered into a description of the classification of the appearance of language, its basic features is metaphorical. Cross-disciplinary domain of the past will pin their hopes on the concepts and logical reasoning and arguments permit. Today, the language of metaphor for understanding the nature, making metaphor and narrative clues as cross-domain, and in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and even among. The reason why life events, actions and circumstances can be constructed to the story, because there I am with the interaction between multiple otherness, its impetus came from one continuous extrapolation, and extrapolation of each other. And diversity of his stories were always the people the story, and always coming to the multivariate description of those who hear him. Through stories, we witness In order to the meaning of life, but always to witness the way metaphor and description of each story to each other through mutual enrichment. Description of the future, after all, the story, no matter real or imagined, there is established based on the relationship regardless of which I was with him who have the freedom in the relationship, a relationship in freedom. It is also across the world who can not break the fundamental driving force and field-based. This paper assumes that there is an undetermined dynamic energy for meaningfulness in human desire, which develops and transcends any particular realization. This is the original energy by which human beings could attain transcendence by way of immanence, which is not an idealist process, but rather originated from a body-based desire that develops upwards and fuller to integrate the mental and the spiritual. Representability, first non-linguistic and then linguistic, is the access to meaning for our desire that takes body as its mode of existence. Through different forms of representation, such as sounds, pictures and gestures ... etc., the project of meaning is specified. The movement of body in intelligible forms is the common origin of music, dancing and performative arts. Cultural difference and artistic boundaries are based upon differences in the nature and rule of these intelligible forms. The art of filming, which synthesizes image, music and body movement in presenting images moving in time so as to tell stories of various kinds. All forms of art are "inducers of desire" by articulating, determining and guiding our desire for meaning. This dynamic development of our desire for meaning is the common basic energy by which we can cross the borders of different arts. Story-telling presupposes linguistic representation accessible to our meaning dynamism. In the past, concepts and logical reasoning and argumentation were taken to be the hope for interdisciplinary research. But now, with the better understanding we have of the metaphoric nature of language, metaphors and narratives are taken to be the clue for a cross-bordering effort in different sciences, human , social and natural. If there are events, actions and plots in human existence to be constructed as stories, it is because there is always interaction with multiple others, the dynamism of it consisting in our incessant act of strangification and mutual strangification. Stories are always stories about one self with multiple others and told to multiple others. By telling stories, we witness a particular way of meaningful life, always metaphorically interpreted. We achieve mutual enrichment by telling stories to each other. The ultimate foundation of cross-bordering in arts and scientific disciplines consists in the ontology of dynamic relation, in which there is relatedness in freedom and freedom in being related, and this is the ground on which all our life stories, both real and imaginative, are based. (shrink)

M. Roch Bouchard has contributed an intriguing essay to Idealistic Studies: “Idealist Requirements and the Affirmation of the Other World—the Lachelier Case”. His subject, the distinguished French idealist, Jules Lachelier, is shown by M. Bouchard to have idealized in triumphantly paradoxical form certain tensions between Divine Immanence and Transcendence that have troubled Biblical religionists for millennia. Problems raised for the educated faithful by thinkers like Parmenides, Plotinus, Eriugena, Boehme, Spinoza, Goethe, and Hegel came home all at once to roost for (...) Lachelier, a devout Roman Catholic. (shrink)

M. Roch Bouchard has contributed an intriguing essay to Idealistic Studies: “Idealist Requirements and the Affirmation of the Other World—the Lachelier Case”. His subject, the distinguished French idealist, Jules Lachelier, is shown by M. Bouchard to have idealized in triumphantly paradoxical form certain tensions between Divine Immanence and Transcendence that have troubled Biblical religionists for millennia. Problems raised for the educated faithful by thinkers like Parmenides, Plotinus, Eriugena, Boehme, Spinoza, Goethe, and Hegel came home all at once to roost for (...) Lachelier, a devout Roman Catholic. (shrink)

M. Roch Bouchard has contributed an intriguing essay to Idealistic Studies: “Idealist Requirements and the Affirmation of the Other World—the Lachelier Case”. His subject, the distinguished French idealist, Jules Lachelier, is shown by M. Bouchard to have idealized in triumphantly paradoxical form certain tensions between Divine Immanence and Transcendence that have troubled Biblical religionists for millennia. Problems raised for the educated faithful by thinkers like Parmenides, Plotinus, Eriugena, Boehme, Spinoza, Goethe, and Hegel came home all at once to roost for (...) Lachelier, a devout Roman Catholic. (shrink)

The influence of the thought of the great German Idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel on the thought of Theodor Adorno, the leading thinker of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, is unmistakeable, and has been the subject of much commentary. Much less discussed, however, is the influence of Hegel's prominent contemporary, F.W.J. Schelling. This article investigates the influence of Schelling on Adorno, and the sometimes striking parallels between fundamental motifs in the work of both thinkers. It argues that Adorno's critique (...) of Hegelian dialectics, his conception of the relation between nature and spirit, and his philosophy of history owe a considerable debt to Schelling. Furthermore, when adequately explicated, Schelling's position on a range of problems which confronted German Idealist philosophy often prove intrinsically preferable to those of Hegel. (shrink)

Before dealing directly with the content of Urban's thought, there remains to be singled out one of its general traits, a grasp of which is absolutely necessary for any understanding of his thought. From the beginning, Urban's philosophy has exhibited a refusal to accept any ultimate impasse in thought. His is the understanding or irenic type of view over against the one-sided or polemic type. For him, reason is always comprehensive enough to sustain differences of opinion, and it is able, (...) if one goes deeply enough, to show the relativity of all exclusive oppositions in philosophical thought. There is an almost Hegelian passion for synthesis in his dogged attempts to get beyond certain disagreements between philosophical positions. It was his wont to regard impasses in thought as futile in the precise sense that neither side is able to refute the other simply because there is a sense in which both are right and both are wrong. Many illustrations from the writings of what might be called this "transcending" approach can be given: in History he seeks to show the two-fold nature of sufficient reason as both logical and ontological and approves of Kant's attempt to establish a mediating position beyond both; in Valuation the attempt is made to get "beyond the dichotomy of 'appreciation' and 'description' "; in Intelligible the view is taken that logical values are neither "existent" nor "subsistent" but "simply valid" which view is said to be beyond special ontological prejudices; in Humanity Urban is concerned to show that the religious tradition of the West has been beyond the ultimate antithesis of pure deity or mere humanity and that an indissoluble relation between the two has always been acknowledged and accepted; the attempt to get "beyond" occupies, of course, the whole of Beyond, and need not be singled out for special attention at this juncture. These illustrations are only a few of many; in calling attention to this general trait, however, it must not be thought that anything more is intended than the emphasizing of a singularly important feature of Urban's thought. Such a trait, howsoever clearly understood, would still leave us far from an adequate comprehension of his idealism; but without taking it into account his views will often appear to lack sharpness and conviction. All that can be said is that these are some of the disadvantages of a harmonizing or transcending position. (shrink)

According to Immanuel Kant’s well-known account of his own intellectual development, it was the skeptic David Hume who roused him from his dogmatic slumber. According to some popular accounts of post-Kantian philosophy, it was the soporific speculation of the idealists that quickly returned German philosophy to the Procrustean bed of unverifiable metaphysics, where it dogmatically slept for half of the nineteenth century. This popular picture of post-Kantian German philosophy receives some apparent support from the relevant evidence. After all, Kant had (...) allegedly demonstrated the illegitimacy of all metaphysical speculation that transcends the bounds of experience, and the writings of the German idealists - filled as they are with references to what is putatively “absolute” and “unconditioned” - seem to violate Kant’s strictures. In place of this popular conception, I seek to sketch out a rather difference picture of German idealism. The development of post-Kantian German idealism is best described, not as a turning away from skepticism, but rather as a radicalization of it. The radicalization of skepticism from Kant through Fichte to Hegel, however, does not lead away from systematic philosophy. The movement of thought from Kant to Hegel coincides with the gradual realization that skeptical thought is not external to systematic philosophy, but is in fact internal to, or even identical with it. This thesis concerning the progressive “radicalization” or “internalization” of skepticism in German idealism receives some prima facie support form the relevant writings of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. (shrink)

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic (...) garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism ; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless.". (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas' view that Adorno's thinking is characterized by a commitment to a philosophy of consciousness, and that therefore the only alternative to identitarian reason is to appeal to an intuitive competence operating beyond the range of conceptual thought, it is arged (1) that Adorno conceptualizes the modern epistemic subject (the subject of a philosophy of consciousness) as based on a reification, and (2) that he denies the possibility of a concept-transcendent (foundationalist) constraint on judgments. In seeking to demonstrate (...) against versions of subjective idealism and foundationalism how thought can be responsive to a non-identical (mind-independent) reality, Adorno defends an intersubjectivist and historicist view of knowledge according to which the operative and yet anamnetic aspiration of knowledge is to know reflectively the object as it is in itself. The conclusion is that although Adorno questions the modern (Kantian) stress on epistemic autonomy, he does not take leave of modernity in the sense ascribed to him by Habermas. (shrink)

This thesis defends an account of value which emphasizes the central place occupied by experiences among the objects of evaluation, a point that is particularly stark in the case of aesthetic value, to which a chapter is devoted that adumbrates the wider understanding of value subsequently defended. More generally it is argued that values do not transcend the attitudes and institutions in which they are embodied. They nonetheless enjoy in virtue of their structuring by norms of consistency, stability and deference (...) enough in the way of objectivity to do justice to various phenomenological considerations often thought to favour realism. It is argued however that this level of objectivity is compatible with the rejection of any form of reductive naturalism and, more generally, of cognitivism- views which should indeed, it is argued, be rejected in favour of an expressivistic understanding of value. (shrink)

Husserl’s allegiance to realism came under attack following his Ideas. Ingarden was a fierce critic of his teacher’s turn to transcendental idealism and provided compelling arguments both for his idealist reading of Husserl and for his rejection of idealism. One of the main arguments Ingarden devised against Husserl’s turn was based on his aesthetics. Against Husserl, Ingarden established literary works and fictional objects as purely intentional objects that are (1) doubly structured, vis-à-vis their formal ontology, and (2) endowed (...) with spots of indeterminacy. These facts, Ingarden argues, necessitate the transcendence of the purely intentional object. In this paper, I explore his argument, while establishing the ontological foundation on which it rests. (shrink)

In the last four decades there has been a great deal of work done on German idealism in all fields of humanistic study, including theology and the philosophy of religion, devoted particularly to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. A great deal less has been done of the British idealist school, often because they are regarded as slavish imitators of Kant or Hegel. Such a judgment is though misplaced. There is a rich and independent vein of idealist philosophical and (...) theological speculation in Britain, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which is not often studied in any great depth or mentioned except in passing. (shrink)

In the last four decades there has been a great deal of work done on German idealism in all fields of humanistic study, including theology and the philosophy of religion, devoted particularly to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. A great deal less has been done of the British idealist school, often because they are regarded as slavish imitators of Kant or Hegel. Such a judgment is though misplaced. There is a rich and independent vein of idealist philosophical and (...) theological speculation in Britain, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which is not often studied in any great depth or mentioned except in passing. (shrink)

In the last four decades there has been a great deal of work done on German idealism in all fields of humanistic study, including theology and the philosophy of religion, devoted particularly to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. A great deal less has been done of the British idealist school, often because they are regarded as slavish imitators of Kant or Hegel. Such a judgment is though misplaced. There is a rich and independent vein of idealist philosophical and (...) theological speculation in Britain, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which is not often studied in any great depth or mentioned except in passing. (shrink)

In this highly original book, Victor Kestenbaum calls into question the oft-repeated assumption that John Dewey's pragmatism has no place for the transcendent.

This book is neither a biography nor an in-depth interpretation of Berkeley's philosophical system. There are numerous details about Berkeley's life, social relationships, and intellectual contributions, but Berman neither explores these matters in comprehensive depth nor claims to do so. What, then, does he do? Berman's answer is: "Advancing chronologically, I have focussed on Berkeley as homo religiosus". He uses biographical details to portray Berkeley as a Christian thinker who acted on his commitment both in and out of his study. (...) Berman also locates Berkeley's writings in their specific intellectual and social contexts while tracing a career that spanned over forty years and encompassed a wide range of interests and disciplines, from theology to economics. Attention is paid, for example, to Berkeley's Guardian essays and to Siris, which is characterized as his most popular book during his lifetime. Philosophers now concentrate almost exclusively on the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, regarding their author only as a technical thinker offering immaterialism as a solution to free-standing philosophical problems. It is therefore salutary to be informed about the wide range of Berkeley's writings and regard them as diverse expressions of Christian idealism, a religiously inspired outlook about God, nature, and humanity which issued in, but transcends, immaterialism, the technical philosophical position. (shrink)

Schelling argues that the Kantian transcendental apparatus lacks the ability to systematically ground itself. He insists that one must account for the prior emergence of experiential reality in addition to delineating this reality’s structure once constituted, and he presents his genetic model of epistemological subjectivity as a supplement completing the Kantian edifice. Although he never finally arrives at a satisfactory system of his own, Schelling repeatedly attempts, in various ways, to strike a productive compromise between transcendental and historico-genetic approaches to (...) subjectivity. Given that contemporary thinkers are still wrangling with the problem of how to adjudicate between those who make claims regarding the existence of invariant features of subjectivity and those who reject the notion that there are non-empirical, ahistorical constants defining human cognition, Schelling’s struggle with these same issues promises to furnish today’s readers with instructive lessons about the potentials and pitfalls of the endeavor to resolve this impasse. (shrink)

Stein claims that Husserl’s transcendental idealism makes it impossible to clarify the transcendence of the world because it posits that consciousness constitutes being. Inspired by Aquinas, Stein counters that making thinking the measure of being deprives what is of its epistemological and ontological independence from and primacy over what thinks. She contends that this approach inverts the natural relationship between the mind and the world. Given the complicated relationship between them, however, the question is whether Stein’s argument that Husserl (...) lacked an adequate understanding of and appreciation for the phenomenon of transcendence is sound. In fact, Husserl’s treatments of “limit problems of phenomenology” in his manuscripts from 1908 to 1937, which were only recently published in Husserliana XLII, show that he undertook extensive investigations of metaphysical, metaethical, and religious and theological questions. Tragically, Stein was prevented from gaining an even remotely complete picture of Husserl’s work. In this paper, therefore, I examine Stein’s critique of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in light of the fuller evidence. (shrink)

The origins of object theory in the philosophical psychology and semantics of Alexius Meinong and the Graz school can be traced both to the insight and failure of Franz Brentano's immanent objectivity or intentional in-existence thesis. The immanence thesis is documented, together with its critical reception in Alois Höfler's Logik, Twardowski's Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, and Meinong's mature Gegenstandstheorie, in which immanent thought content and transcendent intentional object are distinguished, and Brentano's thesis of immanent intentionality (...) as the mark of the mental is reinterpreted to imply that only content is the immanently intentional component of presentations. Brentano's thought from the early immanence thesis through the so-called Immanenzkrise and his later reism is explored against the background of his students' reactions to the original 1874 intentionality thesis and its idealist implications, in the emergence of Meinong's object theory and Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Finally, Brentano's reism in the later ontology is critically examined, as his solution to ontic problems of immanent intentionality, limiting intentional objects to transcendent concrete particulars. (shrink)

Sartre’s relation to Kant in his essay The Transcendence of The Ego (TE) remains unexplained. In the last two decades, attention has increasingly been focused on TE for two main reasons. On the one hand, this essay provides an early formulation of a fundamental insight leading to Sartre’s masterpiece, Being and Nothingness. On the other hand, Sartre’s critical reflections on consciousness and self-consciousness remains relevant for our contemporary philosophical thinking. In TE, Sartre’s main goal is apparently to criticize Kant’s transcendental (...) idealism and thereby establish his own thesis about the spontaneity of consciousness. Therefore, an explication and evaluation of Sartre’s critical reading of Kant is crucial to make sense of his own position. Though there has been attention in the discussion to TE, Sartre’s criticism of the Kant has not yet been adequately analyzed and well understood. This paper will focus on crucial elements in Sartre’s rejection of Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Sartre’s relation to Kant in his essay The Transcendence of The Ego (TE) remains unexplained. In the last two decades, attention has increasingly been focused on TE for two main reasons. On the one hand, this essay provides an early formulation of a fundamental insight leading to Sartre’s masterpiece, Being and Nothingness. On the other hand, Sartre’s critical reflections on consciousness and self-consciousness remains relevant for our contemporary philosophical thinking. In TE, Sartre’s main goal is apparently to criticize Kant’s transcendental (...) idealism and thereby establish his own thesis about the spontaneity of consciousness. Therefore, an explication and evaluation of Sartre’s critical reading of Kant is crucial to make sense of his own position. Though there has been attention in the discussion to TE, Sartre’s criticism of the Kant has not yet been adequately analyzed and well understood. This paper will focus on crucial elements in Sartre’s rejection of Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)