Transcendental idealism and finitude. An ordinary language inquiry into the limits of understanding

Abstract

Human beings are finite in many ways. In my dissertation, I present an original account of the limits of understanding by focusing on the key case study of Transcendental Idealism and using the procedures of Stanley Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy. In a nutshell, I argue that the putative paradoxes that are generally thought to emerge in thinking through such limits actually hinge on a misunderstanding of the real nature of such limits – a misunderstanding that emblematically occurs in transcendental idealists’ theorising. I then explain how we are to understand instead such limits and offer novel responses to bedrock arguments and architectures entrenched in the literature. Throughout this dissertation, you will see me engaging in depth with Cavell’s writings and extracting critical insights lamentably underappreciated in contemporary analytic philosophy. My dissertation has three parts. In the first part, I provide an overview of the debate on Transcendental Idealism and the limits of understanding. Chapter 1 introduces a broad construal of the theory and spells out the paradox it is generally thought to face. Chapter 2 explores possible attempts to escape this paradox before concluding that its proponents can actually embrace it but face instead a different and more radical predicament, for they seem to envisage no genuine position, whether inconsistent or not. In the second part, I present the philosophical approach through which I show that this predicament is real, namely Stanley Cavell’s. Chapter 3 sheds light on the tenets of Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy. Chapter 4 argues that, ironically, his approach embodies a sui generis form of transcendentalism that has the potential to subvert rather than support transcendental idealists’ theorising. In the third part, I demonstrate how the approach fares with Transcendental Idealism and accordingly explain what we can learn about the real nature of the limits of understanding. Chapter 5 argues, by analogy with Cavell’s ordinary-language diagnosis of external-world scepticism, that transcendental idealists’ attempt to articulate their putative theory about human understanding and its limits ultimately proves confused. Chapter 6 shows that a critical moral nevertheless emerges from their confused efforts (as, for Cavell, one emerges with scepticism), which I call the ‘truth in Transcendental Idealism’, not to be mistaken for the truth of transcendental idealists’ putative theory. Chapter 7 offers an account of the limits of understanding in light of the truth in Transcendental Idealism and points out why, given this account, the paradoxes such limits are generally thought to raise vanish.

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ORCID for Francesco Gandellini: orcid.org/0009-0007-0574-3064

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