CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning
Edition: First edition
Publisher: Studies in Theory and Behavior
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Salem, U.S.A.
Language: eng
Number of pages: 885
Copyright date: 2020
Description: eBook edition, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4008730
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No-Derivs license
Notes: The **Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning** comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. This massive study of 885 pages has been published as a free open access eBook. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.

In Kant’s **Critique of Pure Reason** we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new Critique focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ conflict with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge.

This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful.

The **Critique of Impure Reason** proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. 

The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of possible meaning are determined.

Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, metalogical projection. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. 

Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the **Critique of Impure Reason** develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems.
Table of contents: title: CONTENTS AT A GLANCE; title: Preface; title: Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker; title: Acknowledgments; title: Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call; title: Introduction; title: A note to the reader; title: A note on conventions; title: PART I; title: WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN; title: 1  Philosophical-psychological prelude; title: 2  Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic; title: 3  Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference; title: 4  The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality; title: PART II; title: THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE; title: A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy; title: 5  Reference, identity, and identification; title: 6  Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference; title: 7  Possibility theory; title: 8  Presupposition logic, reference, and identification; title: 9  Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference; title: 10  Framework relativity; title: 11  The metalogic of meaning; title: 12  The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness; title: 13  Projection; title: 14  Horizons; title: 15  De-projection; title: 16  Self-validation; title: 17  Rationality: Rules of admissibility; title: PART III; title: PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE; title: Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science; title: 18  Ontology and the metalogic of reference; title: 19  Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics; title: 20  The conceptually unreachable: “The far side”; title: 21  The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism; title: 22  The projections of time, space, and space-time; title: 23  The projections of causality, determinism, and free will; title: 24  Projections of the self and of solipsism; title: 25  Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields; title: 26  Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference; title: 27  Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference; title: 28  Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory; title: PART IV; title: HORIZONS; title: 29  Beyond belief; title: 30  Critique of Impure Reason: Its results in retrospect; title: SUPPLEMENT; title: The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference; title: APPENDIX I; title: The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers; title: APPENDIX II; title: Epistemological Intelligence; title: References; title: Index; title: About the author