Idealist constructivism and the alleged problem of the pre-existence of Nature

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Varsovia

Conferencia; Kolloquium der Forschungsstelle für deutsche Philosophie; 2018

Uniwersytet Warszawski (Universidad de Varsovia)

Theologizing metaphysics relies on the presupposition of the inexistence of the world: since the world have once not existed it is necessary to postulate a cause for its actual existence, i.e. an extrinsic principle to explain the beginning of the causal series of all things that constitute the world. After the critique of this kind of metaphysics by authors such as Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, the concept of an absolute beginning still persists in a field in which it often goes as such unnoticed while it factually enjoys wide acceptance, namely in epistemology. It sounds as a truism that knowledge begins: personal inexistence (birth-death cycle) and the phenomenon of unconsciousness (sleep-wake cycle) seem to endorse the obviousness of that statement. Now, to link the beginning of the phenomenal series of subjective acts of knowledge with the existence of an external world that must cause the content of the transient cognitive acts relies, however, on two presuppositions, namely on the thesis of an absolute non-being - or nothingness - of knowledge and, intrinsically related to this first presupposition, on the thesis of an absolute beginning of cognitive activity. If knowledge begins from its own absolute non-being, there must be a cause that is extrinsic to the totality of acts of knowledge, a cause that it does not belong to the series of cognitive acts and, therefore, that it is not caused by any of them: this ?uncaused cause? of knowledge is supposed to be the real world external to the knowing subject. In my talk I will try to make explicit the intrinsic relation between the presupposition of an absolute not-being and beginning of knowledge with a realist-empiricist approach to epistemology, and I will propose instead, as an alternative solution to the specific problems raised by that approach with its presuppositions, some basic theoretical claims of absolute idealism.