CEFISES Seminar: Samuel Descarreaux, “Neo-Kantian Epistemology and Pragmatic Naturalization: The Case of Hermann von Helmholtz”

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@CEFISES

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

Speaker: Samuel Descarreaux  (Université de Liège, Belgium – Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)

Title: “Neo-Kantian Epistemology and Pragmatic Naturalization: The Case of Hermann von Helmholtz”

Abstract

This talk examines how the Vienna Circle’s distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery informs Michael Friedman’s interpretation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century neo-Kantian epistemology and —drawing on Sami Pihlström’s work— proposes an alternative model of transcendental naturalism as a “pragmatically naturalized transcendental epistemology”. After introducing the anti-metaphysical Viennese distinction— commonly attributed to Hans Reichenbach—I argue that Michael Friedman’s reading of Helmholtz, centered on the problematic geometrical definition of the free mobility of rigid bodies, maintains a principled separation between the reality of external objects, shaped by human psychophysical dispositions, and scientific objectivity. The latter depends on the strict conformity between standards of measurement and the magnitudes measured, on causality as a regulative condition for the comprehensibility of nature, and on a practical choice among different equipossible ontological frameworks.

In response, I develop a broader pragmatically naturalized transcendental interpretation of Helmholtz, grounded in a naturalized epistemology that carries forward Kant’s critical and constructivist project from within the epistemic constraints of scientific practice and human psychophysical embeddedness. These constraints, which require revising the fixed, necessary, and universal Kantian a priori of categories and cognitive faculties, frame a functionalist account of cognition—manifest in Helmholtz’s theory of sign perception and unconscious predictive inference—as a system of practical, goal-directed adaptive mechanisms that presuppose causality as a trustworthy regulative condition of possibility. The view thus combines empirical realism regarding the external constructed world with transcendental dependence on the conditions of cognition and conceptual practices, making it “practice-oriented enough to be ‘pragmatist’ and condition-oriented enough to be ‘transcendental’” . Therefore, my study resituates Friedman’s interpretation of Helmholtz’s physical geometry within a pragmatic horizon—one that remains critical of anti-metaphysical positions. From this vantage point, a long-overdue rapprochement between the early nineteenth-century proponents of a “return to Kant” and contemporary analytic Kantianism becomes not only possible but philosophically fruitful.