Sebastian Gardner

Professor of Philosophy at University College London; specialist on Kant, Schelling, and German Idealism, with sustained engagement of how the post-Kantian tradition bears on continental philosophy of mind and ontology. Two wiki sources span Gardner's specifically Merleau-Ponty-relevant work.

Why Gardner Matters for the Wiki

The two ingested papers form a deliberate pair traceable to the wiki's coverage of the Kant→Schelling→MP arc:

  1. gardner-2016-kant-third-critique-schelling — argues that Phenomenology of Perception recapitulates the development from Kant's subjective idealism to Schelling's Real-Idealismus via the Third Critique; the chiasm in V&I structurally parallels Schelling's Real-Idealismus (six-element analysis); proposes a "para-aesthetic" construal of phenomenology analogous to Kantian taste judgements. The paper supplies the wiki's most rigorous transcendental-philosophy reading of pre-objectivity and the chiasm.

  2. gardner-2018-thoughts-indebtedness-to-being — does not directly discuss MP. Reads Schelling's late 1850 Quelle as developing a proto-transcendental insight already embryonic in Kant's pre-Critical Beweisgrund (1763): thought is indebted to being for its own possibility (unvordenklich). Supplies the deep background for the Kant→Schelling development that the 2016 companion paper traces to MP.

Together the two papers make Gardner the wiki's primary reference for Schelling read systematically, the Daß/Was distinction, positive philosophy, and the structural parallel between Real-Idealismus / Daß/Was and the chiasm — two asymmetrically bi-directional formal structures.

Scholarly Profile

  • Position: Professor of Philosophy, University College London.
  • Method: systematic rather than historical reconstruction. Gardner does not claim MP was directly inspired by the Beweisgrund or the Quelle; the connections are reconstructive, used to "get a better understanding" of the systematic problem.
  • Distinctive interpretive moves: (i) the chiasm's six-element parallel with Schelling's Real-Idealismus; (ii) the philosophical-aestheticism / para-aesthetic reading of phenomenology; (iii) the diagnosis of an "absolute Setzung" ambiguity in Kant's Beweisgrund that Schelling's Quelle resolves; (iv) the Schelling-Hegel opposition as undecidable from inside the "Situation of Thinking."
  • Wiki coverage: two papers (2016, 2020). The wiki has not engaged Gardner's earlier monograph-level work on Kant or his treatments of Sartre and existentialism.

Connections

  • authored gardner-2016-kant-third-critique-schelling — the MP-direct paper.
  • authored gardner-2018-thoughts-indebtedness-to-being — the deep-background paper on Kant's Beweisgrund and Schelling's Quelle.
  • reads Kant as containing the proto-transcendental insight Schelling rehabilitates; reads the Third Critique as validating MP's alternative transcendentalism.
  • reads Schelling as paradigmatic of the asymmetric bi-directionality that the chiasm structurally inherits.
  • grounds unvordenklich, dass-was-distinction, positive-philosophy — the wiki concept pages for Schelling's late vocabulary.
  • contrasts with Hegel — the Schelling-Hegel dispute is "all-decisive" but undecidable from within the Situation of Thinking; the resolution depends on the history of philosophy and on Wissenschaft as reversal of the ordo inversus.

Sources