CEFISES Seminar: Sami Pihlström, “Putnamian Transcendental Arguments”

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Series: MEPHISTO (MEtaphysics and PHIlosophy of Science: Transcendental Orientations)

Speaker: Sami Pihlström (University of Helsinki)

Title: “Putnamian Transcendental Arguments”

Abstract

Given Hilary Putnam’s deep interest in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, it is surprising that he never sympathized with his interlocutors’ proposals to compare his views on realism and idealism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. In this paper, I am trying to interpret Putnam as a Kant-inspired transcendental philosopher. I will confine myself to an investigation of a selection of Putnam’s (or, rather, Putnamian) transcendental arguments. I will argue that some of these arguments offer us useful philosophical resources for developing a pragmatic non-reductive naturalism – i.e., a version of transcendental naturalism, or pragmatically naturalized transcendental philosophy. The paper will briefly discuss five transcendental arguments: (i) the Brains in a Vat argument; (ii) the argument against metaphysical realism based on conceptual relativity; (iii) the argument for realism rejecting relativism and other non-realisms; (iv) the argument against reductive naturalism (or physicalism); and (v) the argument for the entanglement of fact and value.