Daniel C. Dennett approaches philosophy of mind in a manner typical for reverse engineering. He studies the construction and behaviour of a mechanism in order to discover what are the functions of various units in the system. He applies this method to explain some biological facts and then to interpret specifically mental operations. The author tries to establish why Dennett uses this approach and proposes that his main reason may have been to sustain a naturalistic conception of mind.
The paper aims to reconstruct rationally Marek Siemek's social transcendental philosophy. Social transcendental philosophy is construed of not only as transcendental and social philosophy, but primarily as social ontology of knowledge, or to put it more aptly - as social ontology of meaning-creating practices. The author pays special attention to the status of philosophical claims about meaning-creating practices and tries to show that Kantian notion of apriority cannot be reduced to analyticity. Transcendental claims are analyzed in the light of their justification procedures, i.e., so-called transcendental deductions. Social transcendental philosophy is justification-independent from empirical knowledge, but not content-independent. It is shown using the example of apparent psychologism in Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'. The dialectical interaction with empirical knowledge, or in Hegel's terms, mediation with it, is paraphrased in terms of natural ontological attitude. It turns out that there is no unbridgeable gap between the social transcendental philosophy and naturalism. In fact, many contemporary discussions in naturalism, for example in the philosophy of mind, share transcendental philosophical assumptions.
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