The Ineffable and its Many Manifestations: A Neo-Kantian Approach

In this dissertation, I argue that the idea that there could be aspects of reality ineffable for us human beings should not be articulated in terms of the possibility of ineffable facts or truths. The thesis that there could be truths whose propositional form or structure is in principle unrepresentable by us human beings, in particular, is shown to be incoherent. The view that safeguarding the natural realist picture of the relationship between mind and world requires the possibility of ineffable facts is also shown to be mistaken. I argue that the natural realist picture requires the rejection of the possibility of any ineffable truths or facts whether their source of ineffability is unrepresentable logical structure or content. The idea that there could ineffable aspects of reality should instead be preserved by construing it in terms of the possibility of an ineffable insight into a non-conceptual or non-propositional feature of reality. Using Kant's Theory of Reason, I argue that the explanation of why anything should exist at all is one such ineffable feature of reality.