Against humanism i

Externalism

pp. 91-100

in: Mark Rowlands, Jo Campling, The environmental crisis, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

We philosophers live in a humanistic age. The dominant philosophical doctrine of our time, today's intellectual Zeitgeist, is that the world is a world structured by us; forged by the architectural propensities and proclivities of our mind. This is the Kantian turn in philosophy. Reality as it is in itself, noumenal reality, is essentially unknowable, and philosophy, accordingly, shifts from the study of being-qua-being to the study of being-qua-known. Philosophy is first philosophy, and first philosophy is the study of the structuring activities of the human mind. Philosophy is the philosophy of thought. This much has been the orthodoxy ever since Kant. Just think how much of philosophy in the twentieth century has been shaped by, and makes little sense without, this tenet. There are, of course, the obvious examples such as the phenomenalism prevalent in the early part of the century. Less obviously, the so called linguistic turn, which, until quite recently, dominated philosophy in the Anglo-American world, was essentially a linguistic form of Kantianism, constituted by appending to the Kantian turn one of two claims: either the structure of language determines the structure of cognition, or the structure of language mirrors the structure of cognition.