The Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. 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 massive 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.

CONTENTS AT A GLANCE

 Preface

Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

Acknowledgments

Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call

Introduction

A note to the reader

A note on conventions

PART I

 WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS

AND HOW IT CAN

 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude

2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic

3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference

4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality

PART II

THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE

A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy

 5 Reference, identity, and identification

6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference

7 Possibility theory

8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification

9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference

10 Framework relativity

11 The metalogic of meaning

12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness

13 Projection

14 Horizons

15 De-projection

16 Self-validation

17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility

PART III

 PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE

Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science

 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference

19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics

20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side”

21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism

22 The projections of time, space, and space-time

23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will

24 Projections of the self and of solipsism

25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields

26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference

27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference

28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory

PART IV

HORIZONS

29 Beyond belief

30 Critique of Impure Reason: Its results in retrospect

SUPPLEMENT

The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference

APPENDIX I: The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers

 APPENDIX II: Epistemological Intelligence

References

Index

About the author