If all I am sure of is my own thinking, how do I get from my mind to the world outside it? Shore calls this the problem of the bridge. The route follows attempts to build that bridge, then attempts to show no bridge was ever needed, and ends with the question changing into a different one.
The question is a theme Shore returns to across the course. The route through it, its stages and the summaries are our reading.
Read down. Each claim is our paraphrase; the time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Descartes, Kant
Certainty begins inside the mind; Kant has knowable things conform to the mind and leaves the thing-in-itself out of reach.
Even if a demon has planted every thought in my head, the thinking itself is happening, so I must exist: "cogito, ergo sum."
Put simply Descartes: even if a demon had put every thought in my head, I would still be thinking, so I must exist. Hence "cogito, ergo sum": I think, therefore I am.
The Copernican turn in Kant's epistemology reverses the direction of fit: not the mind conforming to things as they are, but knowable things conforming to the mind's capacities.
Put simply Kant's "Copernican turn": it was assumed that the mind must fit itself to things as they are. Kant reverses this: what we can know of things has to fit what the mind is able to take in.
Hegel, Marx
Hegel promises to join subject and object at history's end; for Marx, economic position determines thought.
Hegel sets out to solve the old bridge problem, how to get from mind to world: he will join subject and object, though with a dash of mysticism.
Put simply Hegel sets out to solve an old puzzle: how a mind shut inside its own head can reach the world outside. His answer joins mind and world together, with a touch of mysticism.
History's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it.
Put simply Hegel: history ends at a mystical point where all opposites (freedom and necessity, what is and what ought to be, the mind and the world) merge into one. Nobody has ever seen this happen.
For Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it.
Put simply Marx: your place in the economy (the "base") determines how you think. Your ideas, culture and art (the "superstructure") grow out of it.
Where to read it Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, 21–September 22, 1890.
Shore on Bergson and his contemporaries, Husserl
A longing for life at its core; Husserl insists the real can be reached: consciousness is always reaching for its object, and the things themselves are objects as they appear to us.
The thinkers of this era long to reach the real, life at its core, what we feel estranged from; for Shore each in some ways reworks the subject-object bridge problem.
Put simply Shore: thinkers of this period long to reach reality itself, life at its core, which they feel cut off from. Each in some way reworks the old puzzle of how a mind can reach the world outside it.
Kant's willingness to set aside the thing-in-itself as unreachable amounts to fatalism, a kind of surrender; the real thing can be reached, with absolute truth and full clarity.
Put simply Husserl: Kant set aside things as they really are, apart from our minds, as out of reach. That is fatalism, a kind of surrender. The real thing can be reached, with absolute truth and full clarity.
Intentionality is the structure of consciousness: always reaching for its object, like a magnet on a string. Neither subject nor object comes first; their relation does, bridged by intentionality.
Put simply Husserl: consciousness is always reaching out toward some object, like a magnet on a string in Shore's image. He calls this "intentionality." Neither mind nor thing comes first; the link between them does, and that link is the bridge.
Heidegger, Sartre
Heidegger: we are always already inside the world, so there is no gap to cross. Sartre turns the same point against Husserl's bracketing of the world.
The subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists.
Put simply Heidegger: the old puzzle of how a mind reaches the world assumes we could stand outside the world and look at it. We cannot. We are already inside, so there is no gap to bridge and the puzzle disappears.
In his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it.
Put simply In an early work, Sartre rejects Husserl's method of setting aside our belief that the world is real. Following Heidegger, he says we cannot: we are always already caught up in the world.
In the text In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37; Williams and Kirkpatrick translation), Sartre applies Husserl's reduction to the ego itself: "the transcendent I must fall before the stroke of phenomenological reduction".
Horkheimer, Lukács, Shore on intersubjectivity, structuralism and Foucault
Critical Theory rejects promised reconciliations of subject and object, and Lukács insists one start from either object or subject; in Shore's reading structuralism brackets both, Foucault tries to overturn the paradigm, and the question becomes how one subject meets another.
Critical Theory, as Shore sketches the school, opposes theories promising reconciliation of subject and object, closed systems, and claims to absolute truth.
Put simply Shore's sketch of Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School's approach: it rejects theories promising that mind and world will finally fit together, closed systems that explain everything, and claims to absolute truth.
Shore frames intersubjectivity as a change of question: a long epistemological tradition worried about the gap between subject and object; now the issue is how one subject meets another.
Put simply Shore: for centuries philosophers asked how a mind can know the things around it. Here the question changes to how one person can truly meet another.
Phenomenology cheats, Lukács holds. Philosophy must begin from the object, as Marx does, or from the subject, as idealism does; starting with the relation between them is no third way.
Put simply Lukács: phenomenology cheats. Philosophy must start either from the world of objects, as Marx does, or from the mind, as idealists do. Starting from the link between mind and world is no honest third option.
Bracketing subject and object alike and studying only how signifiers interact is structuralism's own route past the bridge problem of how subject reaches world.
Put simply Shore: philosophy long asked how the mind can reach the world outside it. Structuralism sidesteps the question by setting aside both mind and world and studying only how signs relate to one another.
Shore reads Foucault's dispersed power as an attempt to invert and overcome the subject-object paradigm: no subject sits at the source of power, bearing down on an object.
Put simply Shore: Foucault's spread-out power tries to overturn the old picture of a subject acting on an object. No one person sits at the source of power, pressing down on something below.
Kołakowski, Shore
Kołakowski grants the gap cannot be bridged, but giving up on truth would take ethics with it.
On Shore's account, Kołakowski concedes the subject-object gap cannot be bridged and Husserl's quest fails, yet insists we keep seeking truth: abandon it and ethics goes too.
Put simply Shore's account of Kołakowski: no one can bridge the gap between mind and outside world, so Husserl's search for certain truth fails. Yet we must keep seeking truth, because giving it up means giving up ethics too.
In Shore's telling the course moves from epistemology (truth as mind matching object), via ontology, to ethics (truth against lies, authenticity against inauthenticity); history occupies the middle.
Put simply Shore's map of the course: from truth as the mind matching the world, through questions of what it means to exist, to truth as the opposite of lies and of living falsely. History sits in the middle.
Our summary of where the lectures leave the question.
In Shore's summary the arc runs from truth as a mind matching an object, through ontology, to ethics: truth as what is opposed to lies.
Those with a reading page of their own.
Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre.