Circling Around the Transcendental: The Conscious Subject as the Limit of Nature in Raymond Tallis’ Philosophy and Phenomenology
摘要
This chapter reconstructs and critically assesses Raymond Tallis’ critique of scientific naturalist accounts of consciousness, which for all their diversity share a basic commitment to explaining consciousness by reifying it. My aim is to bolster Tallis’ critique of naturalism by drawing on the descriptive and theoretical resources of Husserlian phenomenology. I reconstruct Tallis’ argument that consciousness, as the condition of possibility for explicitness, cannot be explained with reference to empirical objects and their causal relations. I show that this Tallisian argument structurally parallels Husserlian arguments for the explanatory primacy of consciousness understood as the condition for the intelligibility of objects. I then show that despite Tallis’ advance over naturalist accounts, he maintains a residual, problematic objectivism insofar as he, too, ultimately looks to the mode of being of objects when identifying the principles for the individuation of conscious subjects. I argue that this residual objectivism leads Tallis into circularity. I conclude that to resolve this circularity and bolster his anti-naturalist position, which sees consciousness as not only epistemically foundational but also ontologically irreducible in a way that is inconsistent with scientific naturalism, Tallis would benefit from more explicitly engaging with transcendental phenomenology.