ABSTRACT
I believe one does, yes. The senses are fundamental. I have never worked on the senses as such. I am not convinced that the classic inductive doctrine of materialism, of radical empiricism, is the only satisfactory one. There is a profound interactivity between reason and the senses. From this point of view I am a Kantian, not in the analytic sense but so far as the transcendental schematism is concerned and the possibility of constructing “bridges” between the senses and reason, between the world and the imagination. I don’t believe that the senses by themselves furnish a basis for knowledge, or for the faculty of judging and acting. Vulgar materialism, which enjoyed a considerable vogue in the guise of Soviet dialectical materialism, seems to me now at last to be finished. Appallingly foolish things were written in its name in the last half of the twentieth century. The great heroes of Soviet materialism were d’Holbach and La Mettrie-they hardly deserved the honor! When I was young, twenty-five years old, I worked on the German materialist psychologist
Fechner and on the tradition that linked him to Gehlen, but I had to abandon these studies-there wasn’t time for everything. These authors nonetheless left their mark on me.
