Abstract

This dissertation's aim is to explicate and evaluate the argument through which Joseph Marechal claims to vindicate transcendentally the human subject's first step in realist metaphysics, the "spontaneous" affirmation that some conscious data-complex is both coherent and fundamentally transcendently-objective. The dissertation has four main parts, plus an appendix comparing Marechal's notion of the structure of primitive self-awareness with that of Bernard Lonergan. In the first part I present Marechal's conception of "the critical problem" as exactly the problem of guaranteeing the spontaneous affirmation's coherence and fundamental transcendent-objectivity; and I provide an overview of the five-volume work in which he develops an argument to meet that problem, Le Point de depart de la metaphysique. The dissertation's second part is an exposition of the interpretive thematization of the history of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern philosophy that constitutes Marechal's argument in its HISTORICAL mode. He maintains that with the solution of the problem of the one and the many, in the long development from Socrates through Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, the spontaneous affirmation is manifested as necessarily coherent and fundamentally transcendently-objective. And with the critique of Hume by Kant, of Kant by Fichte, and of Fichte by Marechal , the spontaneous affirmation is manifested as both coherent and fundamentally transcendently-objective, with expressly transcendental necessity. The third part is a forty-seven step exposition of the core of Marechal's argument in its SYSTEMATIC mode. The most crucial of the contentions that he purports to establish is, in my view, the following: A transcendental condition of one's having some conscious data-complex as phenomenally-objective is that one affirm that data-complex as both coherent and fundamentally transcendently-objective. The dissertation's fourth part is an evaluation of Marechal's argument. I judge that, notwithstanding certain misleading expressions and dubious metaphysical conceptions that encumber it, and prescinding entirely from the question of its historiographical accuracy, the argument is both genuinely transcendental in its approach and truly realist in its result. Consequently, I conclude that it is essentially sound