The Return to the Abyss & The Revenge of Reason

Instructor: Daniel Sacilotto Date & Time: Saturdays, March 9, 16, 23, 30, April 6, 13, 20, 27 2:00-4:30 PM EST

DESCRIPTION Ever since the critical assault against dogmatic metaphysics initiated by Kant’s transcendental epistemology, philosophy has understood that any discourse attempting to answer the question “what is Real?” must first interrogate how subjective experience mediates the knowledge, disclosure, or constitution of being. In this seminar, we examine some of the ways in which post-Kantian philosophy has proposed to articulate the complex relationship between sensing, thinking, and being in response to the Kantian predicament, clarifying the methodological role of ontological and epistemological questioning in philosophical investigation.

In this second part of this seminar, we follow our historical diagnosis, and explore the methodological conditions for philosophy to avoid at once epistemological foundationalism and metaphysical dogmatism, paving the way for a functionalist theory of the subject and a realist ontology. We begin by rekindling the Kantian problematic of the “faculties” and the crisis of representation following from the encounter with noumenon, which Heidegger diagnosed as having forced a “recoil before the abyss”, and whose irreversible historical effects for philosophical thought Land denominates “the trauma of the exterior”.

Upon “returning to the abyss”, we introduce an alternative answer beyond the various attempts at radicalizing and overcoming critique after Kant, which becomes first elaborated in the works Wilfrid Sellars, and which avows the irreducibility and propriety of epistemological explanation, while reconciling it with the prospects of a materialism. Strategically drawing from various so-called “neorationalist” configurations in contemporary philosophy following downstream from and in response to Sellars’ rekindling of the German Idealist legacy, we then assess the prospects of overcoming epistemic and metaphysical anti-realisms within a systematic philosophical project, engaging with works and insights by Robert Brandom, Lorenz Puntel, Johanna Seibt, Jay Rosenberg, Reza Negarestani, Danielle MacBeth, Fernando Zalamea, Gabriel Catren, and Ray Brassier, among others. As we shall see, in avoiding the pitfalls of vitalist and Platonist “subjectalisms” as much as humanist “correlationisms” (Meillassoux), a genuine “revenge of reason” takes place in the articulation of cognitive functionalism and metaphysical naturalism, providing an answer to the abyss of being.

Image: Jeff Perrott, A White Whale, 2016-17

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