The Path from Cartesianism to Smoking Bans: on the philosophical origins of behaviour control

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Phenomenology, Unity and the Transcendence of Truth

Abstract:

his paper discusses professor Frank van Dun’s restatement of Anselm’s ontological argument proving the existence of God. Whereas Van Dun is certainly right in stressing the importance of a single ontological ‘Archimedean’ point in which the unity of our knowledge and different conceptions of reality jointly come together, it might be nevertheless questionable whether we should conceive of this single point as the Divine Intellect; transcending the whole of our knowledge and being. I will try to demonstrate that although modern philosophy, starting from nominalism up to Kantian transcendental philosophy, has decapitated philosophy from its most precious ambitions - namely the search for both the unity of the sciences qua sciences, being as being and the unity between our thinking and being - it must be nevertheless admitted that ancient and medieval philosophy cannot provide for an adequate answer on the problem of unity either. Indeed, it is exactly the conception of a transcendent God that faces us with some insurmountable epistemological problems. On the other hand, if we were to razor Him away, no point of unity would be possible, and even worse, no science at all would be possible or even conceivable either. As such, if we want to restore philosophy in its full glory, we shall have to navigate carefully between the Scylla of an ‘ontotheological’ conception of God as ultimate being on the one hand; and the Charybdis of maintaining a sword too sharp to tighten instead of cutting through the ‘knot of unity’, as espoused mainly by atheists, determinists and naturalists.

Whereas we ought to be certainly reluctant to follow Van Dun in the same traps where almost all philosophers up to the 14th century have caught themselves into, the idea of a ‘point of unity’ should and must be safeguarded from any modern attempt to dissolve philosophy into a bundle of empiricist sciences. This point of unity should not and cannot be conceived of as something transcendent, for this would conflate a necessary transcendental question with a contingent transcendent one; as Van Dun implicitly does. Instead, we should answer this transcendental question with an immanent answer, namely what has been called, in the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology, the transcendental ego. Together with his conception of the life-world [Lebenswelt], Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology seems to be far more adequate than Van Dun’s theological commitment in order to safe philosophy from its inner dissolution. This transcendence-in-immanence, then, also gives fruit to the possibility of the birth of so-called transcendent truths, as noëmatic correlates of the same transcendental ego. These truths can only be attained in and through the transcendental ego, and were quite recently exemplified through the development of Twardowskian eternal truths. As such, we are certainly in favor of a mild form of Platonism, again, without leading ourselves astray by postulating a divine entity, or a divine world of eternal ideas. In a final section, we will return to professor Van Dun’s findings, by examining his interpretive remarks on the Biblical God. As will be shown, it seems to us that Van Dun’s analysis fell too short to represent the genuine spirit of Christianity, which certainly is the propagation of the idea of a transcendence-in-immanence. But since our purposes are philosophical and not theological in the first place, this will be done in a very brief discussion.

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A critique on the falsification of free will by using Libet-style experiments

Abstract: From the late 20th century onwards, the idea of a free conscious will which we tend to attribute to each rational human being is coming under serious pressure. It seems that with the experiments of the psychologist Benjamin Libet and, more recently, John-Dylan Haynes, the idea of free conscious will has to sing its final swan song. But if the idea of free will might be a dogmatic relic from pre-scientific times, then this also counts for the famous proverb that science always ought to have the right on a last, final judgement. In this paper, we will examine both the 'weak' and 'hard' problem of experiments conducted in the positivist spirit of Libet and Haynes. Do the experiments have much explanatory power? What about the issue of causality and predictability? Can conscious experience be naturalized to its physical substratum? And what about the nature of deliberate action? These are the main questions that will be addressed in this paper.

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