Critical realism and transcendental idealism: response to Duindam

ABSTRACT

In this article I briefly respond to what I view as the most contentious parts of Guus Duindam's defence of transcendental idealism and critique of Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. First, I argue that Duindam does not address the main problem with the transcendental idealist account of causal laws and therefore does not successfully defend it against Bhaskar’s transcendental analysis of experimental activity. Second, I argue that Duindam’s interpretation of transcendental idealism is vulnerable to the problem of the thing in itself, which further weakens his attempt to recommend transcendental idealism to critical realists.

KEYWORDS:

• Idealism
• transcendental realism
• Kant
• Bhaskar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dustin McWherter is the author of The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant (Palgrave, 2013) and multiple articles on critical realism and transcendental philosophy. His current research interests are in philosophical anthropology and post-Kantian philosophy.

Notes

1 See McWherter (2013, 135–140), which draws on and develops a point from Groff (2007), for a more extensive formulation of this objection.

2 See McWherter (2013, 68–79) for more on this interpretation of Kant.

3 See McWherter (2013, 79–85) for my interpretation of Kant as reliant on constant conjunctions.

4 See McWherter (2013, 57–60) for my critique of the two-aspect view.

5 See McWherter (2013, 49–57) for a more extensive discussion of these issues.