ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein sought to uphold ‘realism without empiricism’. This chapter identifies in Wittgenstein’s and in Kant’s philosophies a common line of argument which provides genuinely transcendental proof of (not an argument from) mental content externalism. This line of argument has not been recognised in either thinker’s work. The common thesis defended by both Wittgenstein and Kant is that, if we human beings did not inhabit a natural world structured by a recognisable degree of similarity and variety amongst the objects or events we perceive, we could not so much as think, so we could not at all be self-conscious. (This line of argument is independent of Kant’s idealism, and ultimately shows that Kant’s transcendental idealism is false and unsupportable.)
