From Kant to Derrida, philosophers have argued that we are prisoners of our own subjectivity, forever cut off from reality as it is in itself. But philosopher Danielle Macbeth argues that this skepticism arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, which sees it as a meaningless, disenchanted realm, with meaning located purely in our minds. Instead, she argues, the world outside our heads comes, in the course of our inquiries, to be revealed to be rich with meaning and significance that our rational minds can literally hook onto and grasp in thought—and thereby come to know.

We are, so it seems, directly aware of things in the world, other people and various sorts of events and objects. But do we really know such things? Can we know them? Knowing is, after all, an achievement: it is of things as they are as contrasted with how I, we, or anyone takes them to be. But even when (so we think) we know things as they are, how we are thinking about those things is ineluctably shaped by our biology, culture, language, and history. We would think differently if we had a different sort of body and different sense organs; we would think differently were we living not here and now but in, say, ancient Greece or ancient China.

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Our problem is to understand how reality as it is can set the standard of truth for us limited, embodied knowers.

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Knowledge thus seems to require that we have what is often described as the view from nowhere undistorted by the contingencies of our lives; but our view, and so our knowledge, is inevitably from here, where we are, shaped by just those contingencies. The realist emphasizes the requirement: knowing is a matter of how things are, not merely of how they seem to us. The idealist focuses instead on the limitation: what is known is constitutively perspectival, our view of things. Do we need somehow to transcend our limited, perspectival view if we are to know, as the realist seems to suggest? The idealist sees that this is incoherent: we cannot get outside our ways of seeing and thinking. So, the idealist concludes, knowledge cannot require that we do. And yet, knowledge does seem to require precisely that. It is things as they are, however they are taken to be, that provides the standard of the truth of our claims, just as the realist notes. This is our aporia: we both must and cannot escape our limited perspective if we are to have knowledge. In Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2014), I aim to resolve the difficulty by charting the course of the emergence of knowers as they find themselves in an inherently knowable and fully objective world.

Our problem is to understand how reality as it is can set the standard of truth for us limited, embodied knowers. To resolve it we need to ask a subtly different question, the question of how reality can come to be, for us, significant as the locus of the truth of our claims to knowledge. We begin with the thought that the first seeds of such significance emerge with biologically evolved living beings.

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