ABSTRACT
The knower renounces the aspiration to comprehend, or even to contemplate, transcendent reality by finite powers of human mind. The self produces the transcendental grounds of knowing that enclose the finite and knowable sphere in a complete, self-sufficient system of inferences from certain "intuitions" or conceptions. Kant establishes explicitly on a foundation of transcendental reflection this system, which is first articulated in the Cartesian project for a self-certain modern philosophy. In order to establish itself as self-grounding, the modern scientific worldview had to be based on an ontology of purely finite beings that are known by a pure logic of exclusion-eventually just the digital system of binary distinctions. The finite needed to be disentangled from the infinite in order for properly scientific investigation in the modern sense to become possible. The eclipse of knowing via the Divine Names was among the effects of the return, in its full amplitude, of Aristotelian logic to currency in the thirteenth century.
