The Responsibility of the Philosopher

There are a few things I wish to make clear at the outset. The first is that I do not regard philosophy as a handmaiden to science; indeed, I do not believe there is a privileged rapport between philosophy and any part of the scientific spectrum—not the exact sciences, not the natural sciences, not the “sciences of the spirit” (the Geisteswissenschaften—the humanities and social sciences). Indeed, I do not believe that philosophy is a science at all if we are using the word strictly in accord with its prevalent modern connotation. If by science is meant any form of knowledge,¹ then it is obvious that you have to know a few things to do philosophy, but if science is used to mean a form of knowledge equipped with fixed methods, cumulative results, and repeatable experiments, and above all with set guidelines and an institutional framework, then I very much doubt that philosophy is anything like science. You might be able to call the history of philosophy a science, because like the history of anything else it contains more or less objective points of reference: if someone publishes a book on the thought of Kant, you can check to see whether or not he has done his homework, if he knows the texts for example, and has mastered the secondary literature. But by the time Kant came to write the Critique of Pure Reason, it was already difficult to determine if this was “science” or not, and in any case it seems to me that, as far as Kant was concerned, the scientific imperative meant that it was imperative to have a criterion, a definition that would demarcate that which was “scientific” from that which was not.

Many would likely assent to the view that philosophy is not a science; it is the status of philosophy as a university discipline that causes problems. Naturally it suits us, because otherwise who would pay our salaries, but at bottom there always remains some uncertainty, a gray area. Philosophy may be a university discipline, but it can’t be treated as if it were a cumulative, experimental, objective form of knowledge. The question therefore arises: if it is not a science, or even a cumulative and progressive form of knowledge with objective data that can be checked, what is it?

Let’s go back to square one: why is it not a science? Aristotle held that it was; metaphysics was knowledge of Being as such and topped the hierarchy of the sciences, followed by knowledge of Being as quantity and Being as motility: philosophy, mathematics, and physics. What has happened since? Why is this Aristotelian outlook no longer defensible? Here there is a problem of content, inasmuch as physics is no longer definable as the science of movement, or mathematics as the science of quantity. But from the formal point of view as well, the history of philosophy shows that many facets of what was once regarded holistically as knowledge have been positivized and split off as specific knowledges about various sectors of reality. As for knowledge of Being in and of itself, it has become increasingly refractory to classification as a science, especially since Kant.

After Kant, science was formalized very strictly in modern terms, as a system of propositions that presuppose sensory verifiability: if you cannot bind concepts to sensory data, you do not have real science. And that is how philosophy sank to relatively ancillary status with respect to science. Many still speak of Kantian philosophy as a theory of knowledge that studies the conditions of possibility of the sciences, as what we can call a second-order science. But if that is true, I would stipulate nevertheless that it is still a science critiquing science, an exploration of its conditions of possibility and its limits. As for what Kant calls metaphysics, it is no accident that the attempt to endow metaphysics with a scientific dimension coincides with a profound crisis of metaphysics: from the late-nineteenth-century neo-Kantians on, it becomes evident that transcendental philosophy is a critique and an overcoming of metaphysics. All that remains of metaphysics is the description of the a priori structures of reason, and this is the perspective, as I see it, that passes over with a few variations into the regional ontologies of Husserl.

In any case, with Kant it is no longer possible for philosophy to be the science of Being in and of itself. And that holds good for all that follows from Kant, apart from idealism. German idealism could be defined as the last great effort to link the Aristotelian signification to the Kantian one: Hegel would not say that either Kant or Aristotle was wrong, he would say that the theory of the a priori forms is also the theory of Being. After Hegel, though, the question starts to become murky. I have the impression that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, Kantism rather than Hegelism was the main target of criticism. The very thinkers who criticized Hegel from a Kantian perspective, from Cohen and Windelband to Dilthey and others, actually wound up rehearsing Hegelian solutions. The claim to ground the various knowledges in a more or less subjective form of phenomenalism (the most obscure and controverted point of the transcendental philosophies) is not in the least a Hegelian claim, it’s only in Kant, or more properly in the use of Kant to ground a theory of science, for metascientific and encyclopedic ends—Kant as deployed by neo-Kantians. Indeed, in Hegel we already have an attempt to modify this claim, with the theory of the Spirit as suprapersonal historical instance, and the whole of knowledge as an effective historical subject.

To be schematic, what no longer functions after Kant (what is failing to function in the unfolding of neo-Kantism) is the idea that there exists a stable and universal reason. Kantism is battered by cultural anthropology, by the plurality of cultures, and even, I would hazard, by the objections Nietzsche raises to Kant, and by what emerges with positivism. Hegel is not the main target. What batters Hegel is Kierkegaard, existentialism, and the Kierkegaard renaissance of the twentieth century; but even Kierkegaard’s objections are always tip-toeing delicately along a crest, always on the point of “toppling” back into the history of Spirit (as a moment, at least, of the dialectic of absolute knowledge).

All this merely confirms that philosophy can no longer be a science even of the “critical” kind. But if it is not the science of Being as such, of first principles; if it is not the critique of pure reason, meaning the structures of reason, or a transcendental epistemology; then it seems to me that there is very little left to refute in the thought of Hegel: maybe only his broadly “Kantian” claim to shut reason up in a stable image. If Hegel were not claiming an entirely determined and rational destiny for reason (and it isn’t clear how far he pushed this claim), there would be nothing objectionable in the Hegelian vision of philosophy. It’s a vision in which the only thing left to philosophy is a way of apprehending the historicity per se of all that comes to pass in human reality. Including science.

What I have said so far does not imply that philosophy ought to be cut off completely from science. Rather, it interests me greatly to learn what the impact is of certain scientific achievements, what has changed in the history of our existence, our culture, our human community in consequence. For me, the philosophy of science is basically, whether it likes it or not, a species of sociology or philosophy of culture. Philosophical reflection on science cannot just be the logic of science; Feyerabend was right to ask what business it was of philosophy to tell science how to think. Philosophical reflection on science should be historical reflection on the aftermath of the transformation of our existence by this strain of cultural activity. Naturally, this stance is part of my overall attempt to think in terms of the ontology of actuality, to answer the question: what of Being in a world in which the empirical, experimental, mathematical sciences have developed along certain lines and yielded certain technological results?

In this respect, I disagree squarely with the traditional image of the philosophy/science relationship, especially as Gadamer portrays it in Truth and Method, and Heidegger too, though Heidegger is more astute; his essay on “The Age of the World Picture” reveals a more receptive attitude to science.² Gadamer tries various ways of mending the rent between method (science, that is) and truth, but nevertheless the discourse in Truth and Method always comes round to a defense of his basic claim, to wit, that truth does not rest with science alone (and you can even bracket the word “alone”), there is truth in history, in aesthetic experience, in historical experience: truth lies in the experience of common, non-specialized language, which governs scientific language as well. This is the overriding aspect for Gadamer. Fundamentally, his stance is always a defense of humanism, though it may perhaps wish it weren’t, and perhaps isn’t at bottom.

If I turn to his short book Reason in the Age of Science,³ though, our positions are a lot closer. Gadamer says something there to which I could subscribe, when he proposes to set limits of an ethical kind to science. The problem is not the truth or falsity of scientific propositions, or truth or falsity in the way science regards existing things; the problem is that science has social, historical effects, and on those an ethical framework demands to be imposed (not counterposed). Gadamer rightly maintains that this ethical dimension has to do with the continuity of the spirit, with the fact that we are in this together.

But the crucial point is that Gadamer doesn’t really take onboard the meaning of Heidegger’s discourse on metaphysics; for him, Heidegger’s objurgations against metaphysics apply principally to scientism, or rather scientistic objectivism. There is not, in Gadamer, a true history of Being.

Even when he does concur with Heidegger in the analysis of where philosophy is now, Gadamer in reality limits his discourse to the fact that modern philosophy, since the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, let’s say, or if one prefers, since Kant, reduces the ambit of truth to the ambit of the experimental ascertainability of science. All the rest is outside the ambit of truth. This fundamentally goes for Heidegger too, but the idea never even occurs to Gadamer that this might have come about for some reason. In this sense, Gadamer remains moored to a static vision of the relation of mind to world; he isn’t much of a “Hegelian.” How does it happen that at a certain point we start thinking that the sole truth is that of the positive, experimental, mathematical sciences? Gadamer would say it is simply an error, and maybe it is, but it is certainly an error of gigantic proportions, with stunning consequences, which remain unaccounted for.

That falls a bit short, it seems to me. So when it comes to thinking about science, I feel much closer to Heidegger than to Gadamer, though even Heidegger probably could have done more in this area than he did. Science is an essential aspect of the destiny of Being in the contemporary world. But not just the destiny of oblivion, the destiny of a possible return, too. That is why I lay so much emphasis on that unique place in Identity and Difference where Heidegger says that the Ge-Stell⁵ might be regarded as a first flash of the event of Being:

I inquired of Gadamer whether he thought Heidegger meant those words to be taken with full seriousness, and he told me that he had been present when Heidegger delivered the text as a lecture, and that Heidegger was clearly aware that he was advancing a singular notion. I suppose Gadamer might have given that answer to gratify me, or perhaps had not quite understood what I was asking him. But I take it at face value, because it’s hard to imagine Heidegger just blandly coming out with the statement that the Ge-Stell might be regarded as a first flash of the event. For one thing, he says it that one time and never develops the thought. Yet it shouldn’t be seen as an offhand remark. Something deeper is undoubtedly going on.

I hold to the view that Heidegger’s words should be read in relation to his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” which really means “pictures” in the plural. The natural conflict among branches of knowledge in organized society renders the world picture impracticable, it essentially becomes an image producing multiple images. All that talk about das Riesenhafte and das Riesige (enormousness or hugeness; that which is outsized or gigantic) in the final pages of the essay⁸ is substantially saying that it is no longer possible to grasp the idea of the world picture—that we have produced the world picture, but this picture has then spontaneously, naturally, pluralized itself…. Hence there is no longer a world, there are multiple pictures of the world, and that generates the conflict of interpretations. Now all this is a question concerning Being, but Gadamer never comes out and states as much, and I wonder if he even could have. He remains closely tied to Plato, closely tied to Greek metaphysics, which also, of course, validates the idea that there are various apertures of truth. In a book on Gadamer, Jean Grondin says (without, as far as I know, any protest from Gadamer), that the idea of the plurality of the apertures of truth serves essentially to ground tolerance, to ground dialogue, in the sense that people grow disposed to accept that truth may inhere in more than one point of view. It’s practically straightforward relativism; there is nothing historical, no history of Being, nothing about destiny. Gadamer never delved too deeply into this aspect of Heidegger, never took it all that seriously. It’s odd, because on the other hand Gadamer declares himself a Hegelian: but his is a use of Hegel that minimizes this aspect of the problem considerably.

In 1985, in the first Annuario di filosofia, we published a translation of a 1965 essay by Gadamer on the philosophical foundations of the twentieth century.⁹ Gadamer clearly does not adopt Hegel’s open historicity, tending instead to reduce the stages (“moments”) of the spirit to the objective spirit. It is not that doubt is cast on the triad of moments: subjective spirit, objective spirit, absolute spirit; it is rather that the absolute spirit is blanked out. For Gadamer the absolute spirit forms part of the objective spirit. You could read that in terms of Marxist historicism, that is, in terms of increasing concreteness: we are always part of epochs, and so we work in this “inside” that is history. But if the objective spirit develops no further, it too winds up as Aristotelian Being, a capacious (static) dwelling within which there are many mansions, to on leghetai pollakos. Naturally, this is how I portray Gadamer, an image I have formed for myself, against which I measure myself, with respect to which I define myself. It’s not meant to be incontrovertible.

Not long ago I wrote a brief essay entitled “Story of a Comma” for a special issue of Révue Internationale de Philosophie celebrating Gadamer’s 100th birthday.¹⁰ It is called that because when I was translating Wahrheit und Methode into Italian I was faced with the problem of rendering the sentence “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.”¹¹ Should the commas be included in the translation or not? I have always maintained that they should, even if their presence in the original German is dictated by grammatical conventions that do not apply in Italian (or English), where strictly speaking they should be omitted.¹² So I raised the matter with Gadamer, and he disagreed with me: there was a risk of being misunderstood. Some readers, for example, might wrongly infer that there was a Being that was incomprehensible and that was different from language.

If you think about it, though, the only way for Gadamer to escape from relativism might actually be to interpret the sentence along these lines: Being, in its most general sense, has the character of being comprehensible, inasmuch as it is language. Not: only that Being that can be understood is language. For in the latter case, we would still be stuck with the distinction between the sciences of the spirit and the natural sciences; and more than that, the supposition would be entailed that somewhere beyond all linguistic comprehension there might subsist a Being “in itself.” But saying that would mean returning to the “realist” metaphysics that Heidegger criticized, and that Gadamer cannot accept either.

My proposal to keep the commas amounted, in any case, to an attempt to read Gadamer in the sense of a history of ontology. And it appears to me that Gadamer, coherently with his own premises, ought to have gone down that road. But the step remains untaken, and Gadamer remains stuck halfway between relativism and Hegelianism. Gadamer’s Hegelianism basically consists of arresting Hegel at the objective spirit and in understanding everything in the sense of belonging. It is an important principle, because it indicates the nonreducibility of philosophy to an act of reason, the impossibility of recapitulating the whole process in a self-conscious rational form of knowledge. “Belonging” means simply that consciousness is always within reality, and so it never succeeds in “exhausting” reality cognitively and comprehending it entirely. But it is not clear what the history of this reality might be. If this discourse (the Hegelian format of which is manifest: belonging is another name for idealistic-transcendental reflexivity) doesn’t go all the way and admit the absolute spirit, then it is hard to see what its ultimate sense is. Of course, it has a legitimate outlet in a kind of practical Aristotelianism, which isn’t a futile hypothesis because it does allow a fair number of opportunities, but in any case it always remains a discourse that stops short before it gets to its conclusions: conclusions that have to entail, and cannot not entail, absolute knowledge.

Absolute knowledge—or, dare I say it, weak thought. In truth weak thought appears to me to be the sole alternative to Hegelianism. That isn’t so far-fetched, because if there is no process towards a final self-ascertainment of reason, all that’s left is the idea of a weak ontology. And that holds good even if one thinks, for example, that the self-ascertainment must always and only be provisional. At bottom, one can perfectly well be Hegelian while thinking that the absolute spirit is the maximum of self-consciousness we have attained to date, and that when we attempt to unify the cultures, or demonstrate the truth of certain propositions, all we are doing is trying to realize the absolute spirit, to furnish a relative image of it (and a claim of that kind does not strike me as entirely erroneous.) Now clearly, any effort aiming at universal self-ascertainment, whether the latter is thought of as contingent or truly ultimative, cannot be without direction: the process has to be provided with development in some direction that pertains to all of humanity. But then we’re forced to ask ourselves why the absolute spirit, let’s call it the maximum of actual self-consciousness available to us, has to be our kind of knowledge and not that of the Dalai Lama. If we engage in debate with the Dalai Lama, what do we assert? In that case we have two absolute spirits, each of them minding its own business, and they don’t communicate with one another.

In other words: if you are not to give way to a species of pure relativism, and yet you strip Hegel of the idea of final absoluteness, of perfect self-consciousness, what do you put in its place? For me, you can only resort to the idea of ontological difference that becomes a principle of movement.

Here the parenthesis formed by the dashes is just as important as the parenthesis formed by the commas in the passage from Gadamer. I place a lot of emphasis on “Being–not beings.” It has to be understood within the framework of a teleology, not as a straightforward constatation. Heidegger is saying: there is Being, not beings, if there is truth. There is Being to the extent that there are not just, or not primarily, beings.

Now let’s come back to science. Science is science of Being–not beings, just as morality and politics have been. Being–not beings in the case of politics signifies that we replace our initial emergency agreement to defend our common interests with a social contract, which is a way of transcending the immediacy of beings, getting to a different place, so that it’s no longer homo homini lupus; instead there is the authority of someone chosen by common consent, or else there is collective authority. Ethics too, if you think about it, has always been thought of as something that transcends the immediacy of impulses such as the survival imperative, and self-interest, and power acquisition—something that transcends immediate subjective avidity. Lastly, and perhaps most “completely,” science represents Being–not beings in the full proper sense, either because it has become science of mathematical structures, repeatable entities that as such are quite cut off from the presence hic et nunc of things; or because the very stuff of science grows rarefied, with physics talking about inexistent, conjectural, or infinitely small entities, things right on the borderline of spiritualization. Jean Guitton has actually tried to demonstrate the truth of God’s existence through the spiritualization of the material in science.

From the viewpoint of a philosophical ontology, all this gives us further encouragement to adopt a “nonabsolutist” perspective. “Absolute” ontology, Hegelian ontology, or to put it another way, ontology that looks forward to a conclusion, is always vulnerable to the notion that its time has come and that it must now be imposed on others, or must be imposed because it constitutes finality attained. Even Soviet communism was a kind of end phase of disalienation, and therefore couldn’t “admit” the possibility that further disalienation might take place. But if one strips Hegel of the “absolutist” outcome, then I would have no objection to reading the absolute this way: truth is that which, every time, has taken into account all the objections and has either found a way to resolve them on their own terms, or in any case incorporated them. It’s called dialectic.

The fact that there are more South Asians immigrating into Europe undocumented than there are Europeans being smuggled into the Indian subcontinent might also be a sign of the validity of the Hegelian dialectic, an indicator of the fact that our form of existence is more desirable than theirs. We can accommodate sacred cows within limits, a privation like that we can tolerate, whereas over there they die of hunger. But Hegelism itself undercuts that as an argument for Hegelism. There is an interesting solution in a book by Gianfrancesco Zanetti with the fetching title Felicità amicizia diritto.¹⁵ Zanetti tries to show that extensional liberalism is preferable to intensional liberalism. By intensional liberalism he means the pure affirmation of the right of each person as a totality, a completely autonomous totality, with no account taken of his or her relation to the community. Extensional liberalism, as he interprets it, involves other people too, and the general state of things. There is an old enigma: if liberalism admits all the visions of the world, then fascists have the same rights as liberals. Zanetti addresses it by maintaining that we should have a system in which it is possible to declare your own position, or even cut yourself off from everyone else if that’s what you want (he calls that the right to be unhappy), and that the defense of such a system has a higher quota of acceptability, as a stance, than any other stance available. Likewise, when I say that we cannot do without a philosophy of history, but that the only philosophy of history we can profess is the philosophy of the history of the end of the philosophies of history, and that this is a positive principle, I mean substantially the same thing. It is not just “anything goes.” It is that if you accept that anything goes, and more than that, articulate the thesis that anything goes, yours is the position best grounded in reason.

As far as the history of Being goes, these consequences seem to me legible primarily as the history of the weakening of Being, and in that perspective science appears in turn as a form of derealization, of growing weakness, of transcendence.

Naturally, if philosophy does not bracket science and all its results and achievements and consequences for existence, but does not regard itself as a science either, philosophical practice has some explaining to do: just what is it then? My own response is that philosophy is a discourse more edifying than demonstrative, it is oriented more toward the edification of humanity than toward enhanced formal comprehension and advancement in knowledge. Edifying doesn’t mean antitheoretical, it doesn’t mean that there is not a progressive acquisition of knowledge during the edification of oneself and humanity. Rather, it means that that isn’t the sole or overriding objective. The “edifying,” according to Kierkegaard, is the terrible, the disquieting, and under certain conditions, the sublime (i.e., the negative, which for him means the perception of one’s own finiteness); at the same time, it is that which ameliorates and constructs. So it is not without its theoretical or cognitive side, but it is also something more, and something different.

In the final pages of Husserl’s Philosophy as Rigorous Science there is the well-known distinction between philosophy as a Weltanschauung, a vision of the world, and as science.¹⁶ It is telling that this distinction winds up being essentially ethical. Philosophy as a vision of the world is a grand construct, “aesthetic” with a whole heap of quotation marks, a creative description of oneself and one’s vision of the culture one inhabits. It may shape personalities of a desirable, or even exemplary, kind in certain respects; but at bottom it amounts to an egoistic choice. It’s as though Husserl is really saying: philosophers of that sort are dandies, at most they may become theologians, poets, writers, essayists. It’s undeniable that his depiction of Weltanschauung-philosophy in those pages has many positive aspects. But one asks oneself: how is his own philosophy supposed to escape this risk of aestheticism? Husserl explains that one should instead dedicate oneself to cumulative knowledge that accomplishes small steps, small acquisitions of objective knowledge that will withstand the test of time.

Apart from anything else, the first objection that comes to mind is: why should things that last longer be better than those with shorter duration? When you buy an automobile, the longer it lasts the better, but that principle doesn’t automatically apply in this arena. Someone from Frankfurt might accuse him of articulating the harshest version of compulsory service: you must serve a history that you will never completely appropriate, instead of finding your part in what has come about so far. But leaving that aside, I think of philosophy in terms fairly close to what Husserl seems to deprecate: as essayistic edification. That’s why, for example, I’m neither shocked nor offended when someone labels me a journalist. My response would be that the Husserlian vision of Weltanschauung-philosophy needs some revision: if I speak of philosophy as edifying knowledge (hence neither “specialized” nor “cumulative,” properly speaking), that doesn’t mean that I see it purely as Weltanschauung-philosophy, or as an exercise in style. On the contrary, edification is linked to intersubjectivity, and so to responsibility, which Husserl assigns exclusively to “cumulative” science, to the philosopher who takes “small steps” toward progress in knowledge.

Actually, I don’t even exclude a certain cumulativity in philosophy, not in the sense that the results obtained hitherto are irrefragable and reducible to systematic textbook form, but in the sense that philosophy would not even exist without a textual tradition. So as a historicist I feel myself a “cumulativist,” but not the scientific kind. There is one thing, though, that all this tells you, which is that philosophy is not a natural genus, a cultural mode of knowing. It is defined solely by a textual tradition, with a terminology and a set of problems as corollaries. Nor am I entirely sure that they are problems natural to mankind: even just the the notion of the universality of the validity of a thesis becomes thinkable only if certain conditions of cultural pluralism obtain. In a traditional society, nobody worries themselves about the problem of universal validity: there are valid laws and traditions, and there are individuals variously crooked or crazy or half-witted or whatever. The problem of universality only arises once people have had to deal with incommensurable paradigms, or outlooks on life that differ profoundly from one another; but the authentic meaning of universality arises there too.

My spiritual director, a well-reputed Thomist, said to me that the Summa contra gentiles was a missionary manual, meaning a treatise in philosophy and rational theology meant to be serviceable to those who were setting out to convert Muslims. Because there had to be some sort of baseline from which to start. I am intrigued by the fact that rational theology blooms in importance in a situation in which religious cultures are clashing, when some sort of common ground with the Other needs to be found. Thomas Aquinas and many other past philosophers believed that this common basis was universally human. I would hazard that this universal human basis is maybe not so universal after all, in the sense that it is historically always coming about, and we are continually remaking it.

Science has a codified tradition too, and Husserl’s own notion of a form of knowledge that advances would be meaningless without the idea of a common tradition. And for that matter, philosophical theses have their objects too. The opportunity for experimentation in the positive sciences makes it easy to talk about “objects,” whereas in the case of philosophy it is not so easy to tell whether there really is an object there or not. Yet the distinction I have in mind doesn’t boil down to a distinction between objective and non-objective sciences. It is well known that even the object of science is always defined in large part within a paradigm and out of a paradigm. Obviously it makes a fundamental difference whether it is possible to obtain verification or falsification by experiment, and for philosophy it isn’t and never was. So there is a sort of double bind: as soon as philosophy starts to state propositions that can be verified or falsified, physical or meteorological propositions, it turns into science.

Of course there is more than one way to look at experimental verification and falsification. Popper’s falsifiability, for example, strikes me as more of an ad hominem argument than an objective one. The falsification of a thesis actually tells you nothing except that that is not the road you want to take, that it is no use trying to get from Pisa to Milan by way of Trento. Of course it is grounded in something more than just your own or others’ convictions, but you haven’t gained any positive knowledge except by labelling negative knowledge as positive. In other words: I know positively that such-and-such is not the case; but that signifies nothing. If something isn’t green, it can be any color at all; “not man” could be any other thing whatsoever.

So any modes of experimentality that may be accessible to philosophy aren’t the sort that can be assumed to yield “objective” knowledge. I take it that philosophy can appeal to experience, indeed I am convinced that philosophy contains truths of experience, but experience is always already so subjectively and culturally mediated that it is pointless to speak in terms of objective “increments.” Dialectic, for example, is an experience shared by the philosophical culture of every age, but it is just the experience that if you pose things a certain way (the way Plato, for example, poses the question of one and many in Parmenides), certain consequences, which are always grosso modo the same, follow. My eyes see, I see with my eyes, which aren’t your eyes. If I say “I have a toothache,” I take it for granted that you know what I mean, but I could never demonstrate that you do. These are, so to speak, natural truths, not in the sense of nature but in the sense of obviousness, an obviousness produced, to a large extent, by culture.

So I don’t know to what extent you can still call it philosophy when you employ experimental arguments. Philosophy of mind, the cognitive sciences, for example—are they a philosophical discourse or are they what some philosophers have arrived at largely because of contingent and historical circumstances (for example, the decline and rebirth of psychologism in the neo-Kantian and neopositivist tradition)? I don’t know to what extent such outcomes really have much to do with a necessity internal to philosophy, not philosophy as I understand it anyway, nor, I believe, as it has traditionally been understood in our textual tradition. I don’t picture Kant letting himself be swayed by the discourse of a cognitive scientist.