The Post-Cartesian Blunder, and the Failure to Develop Philosophy as Critical Fundamentalism

How can the world as it appears to us, the world we live in, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That is our fundamental problem, encompassing all others of science, thought, and life. Academic philosophy ought to have developed as the discipline that keeps alive imaginative and critical thinking about this problem—about how it interacts with more particular and specialised problems—in universities, and in cultural and social life. If philosophy had developed in this way, as Critical Fundamentalism, it would have noticed, and highlighted long ago the bad philosophy dominating academic inquiry. But philosophy has not, and still does not, put Critical Fundamentalism into practice. Modern philosophy began well: Descartes’ Cartesian dualism is an early attempt at solving our fundamental problem. But then an extraordinary thing happened. Philosophers after Descartes rejected Cartesian dualism but, instead of returning to the problem that Descartes tried, and failed, to solve, namely our fundamental problem, they continued to struggle with problems generated by Cartesian dualism, the very doctrine they had rejected! That is the post-Cartesian blunder; it had a disastrous impact on subsequent academic philosophy. It blinded academic philosophers to the damaging irrationality of knowledge-inquiry.