Steven James Bartlett

	STEVEN JAMES BARTLETT

In addition to the corrected second eBook edition of this work (published Sept. 5, 2021), the Critique of Impure Reason has now also been published in a printed edition. To reduce the otherwise high price of this scholarly/technical book of nearly 900 pages and make it more widely available beyond university libraries to individual readers, the non-profit publisher and the author have agreed to issue the printed edition at cost.

The printed edition was released on September 1, 2021 and is now available through all booksellers, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and brick-and-mortar bookstores under the following ISBN: 978-0-578-88646-6

Due to the substantial length of this work, some readers may like to have a more detailed description of the book's objectives and method than is provided below. At the time of this update, a Wikipedia entry about the book provides a clear and well-researched introduction to the Critique of Impure Reason.

Commendations of This Work — from the back cover of the published edition:

“I admire its range of philosophical vision.” – Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, author of more than 100 books.

“Bartlett’s Critique of Impure Reason is an impressive, bold, and ambitious work. Careful scholarship is balanced by original analyses that lead the reader to recognize the limits of meaning, knowledge, and conceptual possibility. The work addresses a host of traditional philosophical problems, among them the nature of space, time, causality, consciousness, the self, other minds, ontology, free will and determinism, and others. The book culminates in a fascinating and profound new understanding of relativity physics and quantum theory.” – Gerhard Preyer, Professor of Philosophy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, author of many books including Concepts of Meaning, Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics, Intention and Practical Thought, and Contextualism in Philosophy.

“[This work’s] goal is of a unique and difficult species: Dr. Bartlett seeks to develop a formal logical calculus on the basis of transcendental philosophical arguments; in fact, he hopes that this calculus will be the formal expression of the transcendental foundation of knowledge.... I consider Dr. Bartlett’s work soundly conceived and executed with great skill.” – C. F. von Weizsäcker, philosopher and physicist, former Director, Max-Planck-Institute, Starnberg, Germany.

“Bartlett has written an American “Prolegomena to All Future Metaphysics.” He aims rigorously to eliminate meaningless assertions, reach bedrock, and place philosophy on a firm foundation that will enable it, like science and mathematics, to produce lasting results that generations to come can build on. This is a great book, the fruit of a lifetime of research and reflection, and it deserves serious attention.” — Martin X. Moleski, former Professor, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, studies of scientific method, the presuppositions of thought, and the self-referential nature of epistemology.

“Bartlett has written a book on what might be called the underpinnings of philosophy. It has fascinating depth and breadth, and is all the more striking due to its unifying perspective based on the concepts of reference and self-reference.” – Don Perlis, Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland, author of numerous publications on self-adjusting autonomous systems and philosophical issues concerning self-reference, mind, and consciousness.

he Critique of Impure Reason comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. Thanks to the generosity of its publisher, this substantial volume has been published as a free open access eBook, as well as a handsome printed edition. The study inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new Critique focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ conflict with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge.

This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful.

The Critique of Impure Reason proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness.

The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of possible meaning are determined.

Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, metalogical projection. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning.

Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the Critique of Impure Reason develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems.

The printed edition of this work is available under ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6 through independent booksellers and online retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and others.

A free corrected second eBook edition (PDF, 3.75MB) is also available from this website as well as from the sources listed below. The author and the publisher recommend that readers use the printed edition or the corrected second eBook edition.

Preface
Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
Acknowledgments
Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call
Introduction
A note to the reader
A note on conventions

	PART I
	WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN

1	Philosophical-psychological prelude
2	Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic
3	Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference
4	The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality

	PART II
	THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE
	A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy

5	Reference, identity, and identification
6	Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference
7	Possibility theory
8	Presupposition logic, reference, and identification
9	Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference
10	Framework relativity
11	The metalogic of meaning
12	The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness
13	Projection
14	Horizons
15	De-projection
16	Self-validation
17	Rationality: Rules of admissibility

	PART III
	PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE
	Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science

18	Ontology and the metalogic of reference
19	Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics
20	The conceptually unreachable: “The far side”
21	The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism
22	The projections of time, space, and space-time
23	The projections of causality, determinism, and free will
24	Projections of the self and of solipsism
25	Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields
26	Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference
27	Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference
28	Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory

	PART IV
	HORIZONS

29	Beyond belief
30	Critique of Impure Reason: Its results in retrospect

	SUPPLEMENT The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference

	APPENDIX I The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers

	APPENDIX II Epistemological Intelligence

	References
	Index
	About the author

WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS

AND HOW IT CAN

THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE

METALOGIC OF REFERENCE

Epistemological Intelligence