All the arguments that I have put forward have had but one goal, to answer Jacques Bouveresse’s charge that “the first to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals” (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”) would be well advised to find a “more serious justification than what the philosophers in question would agree to provide,”1 in this case, either the simple practice of the history of philosophy or the development of a particular local investigation, both of which dodge the difficulties of the problem. I thus wanted to show how it is possible to understand philosophy without the end of its history and its history without the end of philosophy.
To do so, I first analyzed the theme of the end or the death of philosophy. Who defends this position, why, and how are they theoretically consistent? These were my questions in part 1. Beginning from the most pronounced assertions (calls for “anti-” or “post-philosophy,” or even the wish for philosophy’s dissolution in an empirical science), I then analyzed this theme in other guises, less provocative than the first but still positing2 the death of the discipline. The theme was circumscribed (in that I am not trying to take a stand on other themes, like the nature of the psychophysical relation, the epistemology of numbers, the meaning of existence, wisdom, or morality) but also foundational, for before taking a stance on wisdom in the face of death, on the ontology of the flesh, on the status of logical universalism or the fecundity of the computational model in the study of the psychophysical relation, we still must respond to those who judge that philosophy no longer has anything to say and only the so-called “hard” sciences, or literature or even religion can speak on such problems. In this sense, Bouveresse is right to call for something other than the untroubled continuation of local practices without ever directly confronting the question of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct discipline.
The analysis of the theme of the end of philosophy in its various guises has taught us that it cannot be uttered or argued for in a consistent manner. Indeed, in the course of my examination, I always found the same logical pathology, a pathology that demanded that we challenge the claim that philosophy is dead as a first, autonomous, and distinct discipline. Can we “begin philosophy again,” that is, can we agree to “reground”3 it? For, once again, we cannot accept the current self-refuting stances in which humanity is so finite that it can no longer even find a possible viewpoint from which it could assert that “humanity is finite.” Confronted by these types of self-refutation, I have tried to construct a model capable of overcoming this pathology, namely, the “reflexive a priori,” a principle of self-referentiality that makes it possible to show that philosophy is a distinct, first discipline, endowed with a rigorous method—a redefined and revitalized transcendental argument.4 This challenge to the death of philosophy, through the demonstration of its distinctness and its autonomy, invited us to put the thesis of the end of the discipline into perspective by looking for its source. I found its source in the “race to reference” that characterized not only analytic philosophy since its birth at the beginning of the century but also, beyond Russell and the early Husserl, beyond Bolzano’s realist turn, has marked all the trends since Kant. I thus showed how readings of Kant as different as Helmholtz’s, Cohen’s, and—an astounding paradox—Heidegger’s converge toward the same point where philosophy would have to give itself up, not because of its real exhaustion but because of its narrow focus on the theme of reference to the exclusion of self-reference.
Thus, we saw how the most diverse and apparently the most contradictory philosophies can be considered as variations on and from critical philosophy. And so Kant has been, for the two centuries that have just passed, what Aristotle was for the Middle Ages—I obviously do not mean to deny this5 but, on the contrary, to contribute to its demonstration by redirecting these different variations of contemporary philosophy to their source and to the problem from which they spring: the tension between representation and reflection, between reference and self-reference within the Kantian system.
Attempting to go beyond this tension, I discovered a principle that, while neither Kantian nor a part of simple formal logic, makes it possible simultaneously to judge the truth value of a philosophical system and to generate positive statements. Beyond this insight, the thesis of a reflexive a priori or a model of self-referentiality also makes it possible to reconsider the history of philosophy, because the theme of the end of philosophy—so widespread today—was historically and philosophically born from a single problem, a single tension, a single question. The model of self-reference makes it all the more possible to overcome, from a well-supported basis, the great oppositions that structure current reflection and thus to escape from the sterile confrontation between Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, as well as to escape from the strange connection that unites positivism and skepticism in a single thought. In a word, the model of self-reference, whose path I have suggested we can reclaim and decipher, is able to help us escape from the age of reference that has led us to the impasses that I have described. In this sense, the model allows us to overcome the ostensible death of philosophy in order to return to an affirmation of its always renewed life.