Thinking Nature: Towards a Phenomenological Naturalism

What is subjectivity, and how can it be understood as a natural phenomenon? Drawing on the resources of transcendental philosophy and phenomenology, I argue that because subjectivity is what makes the world available to us, subjectivity cannot be an object in the world; it is, instead, a way of being open to the world. Subjectivity, as a context of openness to being, is the transcendental condition of all scientific and metaphysical understanding. It follows that neither science nor metaphysics can explain their own conditions of possibility. Rather, such an explanation requires an account of the transcendental structure of subjectivity. Nevertheless, subjectivity is a natural phenomenon, because nature is the ontological ground of transcendental structure. In contrast to scientific naturalism, which makes science the final arbiter of our ontological commitments, I develop a phenomenological naturalism, which holds that nature encompasses the existence of both the objects and laws discovered by the sciences, as well as the transcendental structures that allow objects and laws to be discovered in the first place. Phenomenological naturalism respects the ontological significance of transcendental reflection, in contrast to ‘naturalized’ phenomenologies that cede questions of ontology to the sciences. Instead of taking subjectivity to be metaphysically grounded on things, subjectivity should be under-stood as the transcendental ground of the possibility of the system of relations that we can bear to things. This allows for a more thoroughgoing integration of phenomenology with the sciences, one which does not diminish phenomenology to armchair psychology. Understanding subjectivity in this way allows us to account for the underlying unity of conceptual thought and nonconceptual embodied coping, since the same transcendental structure of openness to the world can be operative in different ways at different times, actualizing some experiential possibilities and not others, while nevertheless determining the form of experience in general. At the limits of scientific explanation and transcendental-phenomenological reflection lies a nature that is not a specific object nor the totality of objects in the world, but the ontological ground of all phenomenal manifestation.Ph.D.2018-03-16 00:00:0