The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

A Kantian meditation

The phenomenal world is a world only because what comprises it is already posited as trans-phenomenal.

The bedroom I leave when I go to the kitchen for another beer is part of a phenomenal world only because I regard it as still there during my absence.

Its posited trans-phenomenal existence is essential to its character as part of a world of phenomena.

But this is different from the trans-phenomenal being posited behind the phenomena.

The former is integral to the world of our naive realism, even if only "in brackets," even if only "as if."

The latter is a ghostly remainder of the Lockean, empirical idealism, originally of primary and secondary qualities, that figures intrinsically in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as inhabitants of this same phenomenal world, projected into invisibility as things in themselves, once we see through naive realism - but not very far.

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