Abstract
Skeptical stalemates put philosophy on the sidelines, losing public purpose. George Berkeley warns against raising a dust and complaining we cannot see. Factoring philosophy, a legacy of Hume, Kant, and neo-Kantianism, kicks up a dust. Factoring philosophy treats the distinguishable as separable when it is not. It separates mind and world into purely subjective and purely objective—the fundamental false move. Mind is said to order the world, which begins a skeptical drama. In act one, mind confidently employs its categories. In act two, sensing, language, and concept formation are deemed purely subjective. In act three, mind’s ways of knowing have turned into obstacles. We wanted to know the world; we end up with the mind’s impositions on it. The knower is cursed with an epistemic Midas Touch. Factoring philosophy presupposes a worldless selfpure self. Like two specters, the pure self and the purely objective but unknowable thing-in-itself haunt factoring philosophy.