responses by Levi

In response to one of Pete's challenges: a really interesting defense of the use of "translation" as a guiding metaphor (or perhaps a rebuttal of the claim that it is a metaphor!) for understanding the interaction of objects HERE (Part 1) and a related post on how Levi and Graham's Object Oriented Philosophy relates to our Kantian inheritance HERE (Part 2) [and now a continuation of the debate in the comments below this post HERE (Part 3); a post about normativity by Tom of Grundlegung HERE; and by Reid Kane of planomenology HERE, and two more by Levi in response to Tom HERE (Part 4) and HERE (Part 5); and another one in reaction to Pete HERE (Part 6)].

In the comment section Levi responds to Pete's challenge to Meillassoux. Since typepad is garbling any attempts to respond to it, I'm going to cut and paste it here: 

Pete,

I suggest you go back and reread my original post responding to Mikhail or that you reread After Finitude. As I outlined in that post, Meillassoux has a rejoinder to the Kantian charge of "conflating the transcendental and the empirical". As Meillassoux observes, while the transcendental philosopher wants to argue that the transcendental can't properly be said to "exist", the transcendental philosopher is nonetheless compelled to always attach the transcendental to the existence of a body in order to maintain the finitude of perception or the manner in which all perception involves a horizon. As a consequence, the existence of the transcendental is dependent on the existence of the human *body* and that body, in turn, depends on the coming to be of homo sapiens through evolution. If this argument is sound-- and I believe it is --then this entails that time in the Kantian sense *does* come into existence in the order of natural history. At this point you're left with one of two options: a) you can argue that the correlation is eternal, therefore absolutizing the correlation and holding that it's existed for all time. If this route is taken, then you've shifted from the epistemological domain favored by Kant and turned transcendental philosophy into a metaphysics, undermining the possibility of a critique of dogmatic thought that he sought. Or b) you can bite the bullet and recognize that the thesis that time is a form of intuition imposed by human minds on the world such that it never applies to things-in-themselves cannot hold up under scrutiny and that we need an account of time that belongs to things-in-themselves and doesn't just range over appearances.