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Emotion, Anatomy and the Synthetic A Priori

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Charles Hanly
Charles Hanly
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Modern philosophy, if it has not settled any other of the chronic disputes that have troubled the history of the subject, appears to have decided once and for all the question of synthetic a priori principles. Logical analysis has demonstrated that synthetic propositions are empirical while a priori propositions are analytical and notational. Nevertheless, a broader survey of the contemporary philosophical scene reveals that the strict meaning of the expression “modern philosophy” above should be rendered “philosophers of one of the current schools of philosophy”. For contemporary European philosophers have not abandoned the notion of synthetic a priori principles altogether. They have modified without abandoning Kant's Copernican discovery of the laws of nature in the human mind. There are, to be sure, two ways of viewing the situation. Either logical analysis has overlooked certain unique phenomena and thus has failed to comprehend the arguments which take their description as premises, or existentialism has persisted in the use of an inadequate logic. The purpose of this paper is to test this issue and in doing so to explore the psychological roots of the idea of synthetic a priori principles. The means adopted is a critical study of the existentialist theory of emotion which claims to have discovered a previously unrecognized basis for synthetic a priori principles in the phenomenelogy of human existence.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1975 , pp. 101 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1975

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References

1 An interesting attempt to formulate such an approach in the field of dynamic psychology has been made by Rapaport. See “Dynamic Psychology and Kantian Epistemology” in The Collected Papers of David Rapaport, ed. Gill, Merton M., 1967, pp. 289–298.Google Scholar

2 Jacobsen, Edith, “The Self and the Object World” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. IX. 1954, p. 87.Google Scholar

3 The unconscious motive here which Sartre does not acknowledge is the need to preserve a sense of mastery over the world. As Schopenhauer so eloquently and succinctly put it, “The world is my idea”.

4 J. P. Sartre, Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, 1948, p. 38.

5 Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, 1957, pp. 100–103.

6 “Seen” and “appropriate” are placed in inverted commas because they displace in experience objective observation and emotional response.

7 J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 1965, p. 31.

8 Indeed, existential epistemology, unfortunately, systematically denies the validity of such a perspective.