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Srinivasan: On one way of understanding it, philosophy is the discipline that proposes to prescind from the particularities of the human perspective, while at the same time showing why this attempt to prescind is doomed.

This principle is the identity A—A. It endures and cannot be disposed of by thought when all empirical definitions of consciousness are prescinded.

Thought therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception.

This is what takes place in the imperfect virtual distinction: the concepts prescind from one another formally, not objectively.

Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence.