The key result of my analyses is to bring to light an a priori principle that was not thematized by Kant (who only accepted the a priori in pure analyticity or in the synthesis of categories and intuition) nor by the logical positivists (who deny any a priori other than tautologies, which are, hence, analytic). This a priori, which is not Kantian and does not fall under simple formal logic,1 is the law of self-reference, which makes possible judgments about the consistency of a system or a certain type of proposition and thereby enables the creation, from itself, of a logic of production structured by a revived transcendental argument. This global conclusion yields several insights:
1. This principle makes it possible to avoid the oscillation so characteristic of contemporary philosophy between skepticism and positivism, positions that cannot be uttered in a consistent manner. Their falsity can be demonstrated by means of argumentation. Their reflexive inconsistency requires their abandonment. This gain is clearly important because, as I have shown, these two options run through different fields of contemporary philosophy and are at the origins of the crisis that the discipline is going through today.
2. Next, I can assert that, thanks to the reflexive a priori, we have arrived at a definition of philosophy as science without indexing its methods and problems to a given existing science. Philosophy is knowledge [savoir] (in contrast to learning [connaissance] about a given object or a given ontic region); this knowledge claims to be the truth; in the framework of philosophy, this truth appears simultaneously as a claim to universality (in that philosophy shares this claim with other sciences) and as the necessity of successful self-application of a proposition to itself. Universality and self-referentiality are thus the two dimensions that delimit the sphere of relevant propositions: propositions concerning validity and truth in general and propositions concerning humanity (or subjectivity, or a certain kind of beings in the world, or speaking beings, or if we want to be even more minimalist and naturalist, a certain species of mammals, the species that the speaker belongs to). This precise delimitation assures philosophy of its distinct status. It is presented not as a language but as a metalanguage. Philosophy’s “meta” function can be carried out and displayed without contradiction. On the other hand, the neglect of this dimension is at the origin of all the contradictions encountered by contemporary philosophy today.
3. This field is made possible by a rigorous method of argumentation: transcendental argument. Neither deduction from a given hypothesis,2 nor induction from an empirical fact,3 nor reasoning from the absurd,4 nor a climb toward conditions of possibility from a factum initially taken as true,5 nor a pure formal decomposition,6 transcendental argumentation is presented as a method for clarifying the presuppositions attached to the class of propositions defined above.
4. This recourse to transcendental argument makes it possible to recast the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences concerning humans, or its relation to what is traditionally called the human sciences, formerly the sciences of mind or of culture.7 Philosophy can make claim to a position not of negation from “above and beyond” but of putting certain general claims of the human sciences to the test. I have shown that any thesis concerning human rationality must be subject to a model or schema in which three factors—not two, as in physics—must be considered: the scientist’s discourse, the contents and the form of rationality attributed to humans, and, as in physics, reality, whether this reality is conceived as a system of arbitrary conventions or rules (according to a more or less Wittgensteinian thematization) or as a series of immutable laws (according to a classically positivist thematization). This conclusion also made it possible to show that the law of self-reference is not unimportant for the ultimate question of reference. As I have proved, establishing the nature of reality sometimes goes through a self-referential type of reasoning.
5. This model or schema makes possible a demonstration of a certain number of more directly concrete theses, such as the impossibility of strict determinism as far as human reason is concerned, or even the falsity of a reduction of the subject to a pure calculation of self-interest. These last results serve only to better underscore the difference between the transcendental argument that comes from the reflexive a priori and the positivist positions that would claim to naturalize humanity or, on the contrary, the more or less skeptical stance of “everything happens as if,” a stance common to a certain version of Kantianism as well as Stanley Cavell.
From a general point of view, I can summarize these insights by shedding light on a theory of signification. As I showed in part 1, the theory of signification can be understood either in terms of the semantic triangle or from a consideration of saying within the said, which can take the form of a pragmatic theory of the utterance (Austin or Searle) or else the form of a phenomenological theory of signification (Levinas). We saw, taking up Putnam’s analysis, how
if we take semantic theory since Frege, we incur a certain number of risks depending upon which side of the famous semantic triangle (sign, meaning, reference) is emphasized. If we emphasize the sign, we risk a semantic relativism; if we emphasize meaning … [we risk] mentalism through intentionality [or] a Platonic objectivism … ; [and if we emphasize] reference (denotation), we risk naturalizing reason or ontologizing meaning, which precedes a metaphysical realism.8
I have carefully examined several of these sides (Rorty, the forms of scientism, Quine) and have shown how, with a theory of saying and the said, the semantic theory can be superseded, not by denying it but in completing it with another dimension. This makes it possible to avoid emphasizing any one of these sides, which always implies a theoretically self-refuting figure. However, my “theory of saying and the said” is neither Levinas’s theory—who, as I have shown, attempts within phenomenology to climb over the first Husserl’s overly semantic theory—nor even a pragmatic theory—Austin. I have shown the aporias proper to each of these theories; we have seen in part 2 how, in contrast to Austin, the conditions of utterance here are not the consideration of a contingent context in which the individual is immersed more or less by chance. Pragmatics thus does not consist, for me, in defining the context of utterance, nor in specifying the limited circumstances that make a discursive act either successful or failed.9 The reflexive a priori, defined as a principle of performative noncontradiction, supersedes contingent conditions and is the condition of philosophical meaning. Thus reformulated, the theory of signification makes it possible for me to bring out another relation between reference and self-reference.
This is why, from my conclusions thus far, I could judge that I had proposed an answer to Bouveresse’s challenge—that those who would be “the first to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals”10 (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”)11 would be well advised to say why philosophy can still be considered to be distinct and autonomous. Simultaneously overcoming the self-dissolution of philosophy in a supposedly exact science (scientism) and the renunciation of the concept of truth (skepticism), the reflexive a priori makes it possible, at the end of this journey, to affirm what at the beginning was only improbable, or even extravagant—namely, that philosophy is a distinct, first, and rigorous science. It is a science because a truth claim is intrinsically linked to its utterance; it is distinct because it is able to define its field (propositions concerning truth and humanity) and its methods (application of a proposition to itself and transcendental argument); it is first because it consistently asserts its function as a metadiscourse; and it is rigorous because it is endowed with a mode of reasoning—transcendental argument, which turns out to be rich in discoveries or future propositions. Therefore, the antiphony of the death of philosophy can be purely and simply abandoned.
It remains for me only to put this discourse about the death of philosophy into perspective. I said in the introduction that if we show that an obituary is (like Mark Twain’s) mistaken, then the question is no longer about said death but rather the reasons for its announcement. What happened so that the idea of an exhaustion of the discipline could become so obvious and so common? How can we situate—and thus relativize—the discourse of the end of philosophy? What reasons led to this theme’s omnipresence today? The reasons are probably multiple; and I propose here to study only one possible direction among others. To return to my theory of signification, it seems to me that, well before the “catastrophe of Frege’s semantic triangle,” philosophy had committed itself, in a progressively exclusive way, to the question of reference, of the “said,” to the detriment of the question of self-reference, from which I have reconstructed its possibilities as a first, distinct, and autonomous science. Therefore, in the third moment of my reflections, I will follow the guiding thread of reference—I will trace the progressive establishment of its hegemony through a concealment of self-reference. A single dimension—reference—has been brought to the fore, even though, as I have shown, reference and self-reference could have been understood together, and a possible joint structure could be proposed—by indicating, for example, how the thesis of self-reference, apparently opposed to reference ad extra, makes it possible, in fact, to generate propositions about the world (like the impossibility of radical antirealism, of a total determinism, or a reduction of the mind to pure repetitive mechanisms, etc.). The theme of the end of philosophy is fed by this concealment of self-reference. And so my task now is to put the theme of the end of philosophy in perspective by bringing this progressive concealment of self-reference to light.