The Givenness of the World The Problem of Directionality in Modern Epistemology

Abstract

As widely acknowledged, the epistemological turn of early modernity was based on the Cartesian method of doubt and negation, which primarily relates to the world of objects. The methodological negation and separation of sensible qualities and subjective attributes of objects left behind residual entities, which, from the Cartesian res extensa to the Kantian thing-initself, explicates an important basic feature of a historically unfolding transcendentalism: the reduction of objects to a mere givenness and the directional conditionality of epistemology that presupposes it. The following paper examines how and to what extent modern epistemology tacitly assumes an epistemic directionality, and accordingly reduces the world of objects to its mere givenness by subordinating the objects to a hierarchical structure of cognition. The investigation is carried out both in a theoretical-philosophical as well as in a historical framework.