Transcendental Experience as a Thought Experiment (Abstract)

ST. PETERSBURG STATE UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE «CLASSICAL GERMAN IDEALISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY»

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Edited by Natalia Artemenko

September 13–17, 2015 St. Petersburg For conference use only

Alexei Krioukov Transcendental Experience as a Thought Experiment (Transzendentale Erfahrung als gedankliches Experiment) In my talk I would like to discuss a topic concerning the idea of the mental experience as an experiment in the transcendental philosophy. One of the main problems of the humanitarian disciplines is that one can see a big difference between two branches of knowledge; humanitarian sciences and „exact“ sciences. The main difference consists in the fact that the experimental dates of the exact sciences can be verified by other researchers, but the mental dates in the mind of one humanitarian researcher cannot be repeated in the mind of another. Or precisely speaking, one cannot verify the data of the mental experience. It allows for the skeptics to say that the humanitarian sciences, and especially philosophy cannot be a real science. We see that the topic is closely connected with the question „Can metaphysics be a science?“, which Kant did not positively answer in his „Critic of a pure reason“. But, in my talk I will not follow Kantian logic. If we can trust or follow transcendental thinkers like Husserl and the German idealist philosophers, the problem can be reformulated in this way: is a transcendent experience necessary? Do we have only one way of thinking if we base our thinking on a special transcendental philosophical method? The modern German philosopher Lambert Wiesing offers the following. He asserts that in the field of transcendental philosophy we have something like an experience in the usual sciences. It is called the „eidetic variation“ (eidetische Variation). Three principles of the method are of great value. They are: self-reflection, phantasy, and self-clarification. In my report I am going to, firstly, clarify the principles of „eidetic variation“ in Husserl’s phenomenology, and secondly relate this to the methods found in German transcendental Idealism. I see three interpretations of the term „eidetic variation“: as a synonym of the transcendental reduction,

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as achieving an eidos of the thing and the transcendental ego itself, and as something that can be held in a phantasy. The same method is used in German idealism. According to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the self-reflexive transcendental subject is looking for its own borders in which it can obtain an area of the self-evident. Everyone who adheres to the same principles, for example Schelling or Hegel, can achieve similar results. The main outcome of my talk should be, that if we accept an „eidetic variation“ as a transcendental method, we can explain, or at least have the chance, to build the abstract category and understand such abstract items like beauty and general philosophical notions.

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