scholarly journals The Tantalus’ Torments of Transcendentalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Sergey Chernov
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Complete System ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
German Edition ◽  
Opus Postumum ◽  
Corporeal Nature

Kant’s manuscripts of 1796–1803, which the Academic German edition of his works combined in 21–22 volumes of under the invented by H. Vaihinger name ‘Opus postumum’, still attract the attention of researchers. Was there really a significant theoretical “gap” in the system of Kant's “critical”, transcendental philosophy, which built by 1790, needed to be filled, namely, to undertake a conceptual "transition" from the already constructed a priori metaphysics of corporeal nature (metaphysical principles of natural science) to experimental mathematical physics, to the entire scientific empirical investigation of nature? In the last years of his life Kant tried to solve a problem that was really decisive for the fate of transcendentalism, which he had already realized in ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and concretized in ‘Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science’, however he found himself in a hopeless situation, which doomed him to the “Tantalus’ torments”. The problem that he was constantly thinking about necessarily arises in the system of transcendental philosophy, but has no solution in it. ‘Opus postumum’ is an important piece of evidence on the insurmountable difficulties faced by the attempt to “save” philosophy as a perfect and complete system of absolutely reliable, "apodictic" science, based on the idea of universal and necessary conditions for the experience possibility.

scholarly journals Transzendentalphilosophie als kritische Bestimmung des Stand­punkts. Eine wissenschaftstheoretische Annäherung

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-50
Author(s):  
Rudolf Meer
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Logic ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Celestial Bodies ◽  
Expanded Concept ◽  
Constitutive Principles

Both the categories and principles of understanding as well as the ideas and principles of reason build transcendental elements to conceive transcendental philosophy as a philosophical system. Accordingly, in addition to the “Transcendental Analytic”, Kant develops in the “Transcendental Dialectic” an expanded concept of the transcendental. The transcendental ideas do not denote object-constitutive principles but, in a weaker sense, conditions of the possibility of experience. The relation between Division One and Division Two of the “Doctrine of Elements” can be demonstrated exemplarily with regard to Kant’s references to astronomy. Based on the constitutive principles of understanding, which are directed towards the field of possible experience and provide a connection of cognition through reasons and consequences, as well as the regulative principles of reason, which form maxims of research, astronomy is a proper and rational natural science. The analysis of the case studies of astronomy shows that Kant uses the term transcendental within the framework of the “Transcendental Logic” of the Critique of Pure Reason to denote conditions that are constitutive for the possibility of an object in general and for describing necessary regulative conditions of experience. With these reflections, Kant places his transcendental philosophy in a long tradition of philosophical thought in which the celestial bodies are the preferred subject.

Kant on Time I: The Kinematics of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Kant-Studien ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-497
Author(s):  
David Hyder
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Analytical Mechanics ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Principle Of Relativity ◽  
Theory Of Motion ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Moving Bodies

Abstract The theory of space-time developed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his (1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is connected to Leonhard Euler’s proof of invariance under Galilean transformations in the “On Motion in General” of the latter’s 1736 Analytical Mechanics. It is argued that Kant, by using the Principle of Relativity that is the output of Euler’s proof as an input to his own proof of the kinematic parallelogram law, makes essential use of absolute simultaneity. This is why, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, he observes that “our theory of time explains as much a priori knowledge as the general theory of motion displays.” (KrV, B 67) In conclusion, it is shown that the same proof-method, under a different definition of simultaneity, leads to the parallelogram law of the “Kinematic Part” of Einstein’s 1905 “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”.

scholarly journals THE LOGIC AND TOPOLOGY OF KANT’S TEMPORAL CONTINUUM

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-206
Author(s):  
RICCARDO PINOSIO ◽  
MICHIEL VAN LAMBALGEN
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Model ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
And Topology ◽  
Transcendental Theory ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

AbstractIn this paper we provide a mathematical model of Kant’s temporal continuum that yields formal correlates for Kant’s informal treatment of this concept in theCritique of Pure Reasonand in other works of his critical period. We show that the formal model satisfies Kant’s synthetic a priori principles for time (whose consistence is not obvious) and that it even illuminates what “faculties and functions” must be in place, as “conditions for the possibility of experience”, for time to satisfy such principles. We then present a mathematically precise account of Kant’s transcendental theory of time—the most precise account to date.Moreover, we show that the Kantian continuum which we obtain has some affinities with the Brouwerian continuum but that it also has “infinitesimal intervals” consisting of nilpotent infinitesimals; these allow us to capture Kant’s theory of rest and motion in theMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.While our focus is on Kant’s theory of time the material in this paper is more generally relevant for the problem of developing a rigorous theory of the phenomenological continuum, in the tradition of Whitehead, Russell, and Weyl among others.

scholarly journals The Concepts of “Appearance” and “Phenomenon” in Transcendental Philosophy (Kant, Husserl, Fink)

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-61
Author(s):  
A. N. Krioukov
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Natural Attitude ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Open World ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Insight Into

This study aims, first, to delimit the seemingly synonymous concepts of “phenomenon” and “appearance” and second, to trace the functions of each in Kant’s philosophy and the phenomenological tradition. The analy­sis is based on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the central works of Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink. Kant does not explicitly distinguish the two terms and only speaks about phenomena when he deals with the categorial application of reason. With Husserl, appearance is linked with the area of the natural attitude while the phenomenon is absolute. Fink’s position is interesting in that it differs from the views of the main representatives of transcendental philosophy, Kant and Husserl. According to Fink, appearing is the foundation of the fact that what exists is and that appearing is being. Fink takes a different approach to the meanings of appearance as opposing the thing in itself which possesses true but unknowable being (Kant) and appearance as taking place in the “relative” sphere of the natural attitude (Husserl): with Fink, appearance (or, as Fink constantly writes, “appearing”) turns out to be the condition of the existence of objects. Appearance, understood through the prism of the human being which perceives something as Vorschein, implies an inherently open world. Following Fink, I analyse these provisions and examine, first, light as the metaphysical source of cognition, second, the human being as a special kind of being, third, the pre-Socratic treatment of being and, fourth, the formation of a distinct phenomenological idiom. I come to the conclusion that the metaphysical-ontological method of phenomenological analysis of appearance proposed by Fink affords a new insight into the a priori principle and the nature of Kant’s “thing in itself” and proposes a new grounding of Husserl’s thesis which questions Kant’s agnosticism.

scholarly journals Transformations of Transcendental Philosophy: Wolff, Kant, and Hegel

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 50-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin de Boer
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Common View ◽  
Synthetic A Priori ◽  
The One ◽  
Priori Knowledge

Kant's philosophy is generally known as transcendental philosophy or transcendental idealism, terms often thought to describe the inquiry into the subjective conditions of empirical knowledge carried out in theCritique of Pure Reason. On this conception of transcendental philosophy Kant is seen to pursue a project very different from both Wolffian metaphysics and Hegelian speculative science. This view is confirmed by scholars who compare Kant's conception of transcendental philosophy to the Scholastics' conception of ‘transcendentals’ such as unity, truth, and perfection. On their account, there remains a puzzling gap between, on the one hand, the scholastic conception of the most general determinations of all beings and, on the other hand, Kant's investigation into the conditions of possibility of experience.In this article I want to challenge this common view of Kant's transcendental philosophy for two reasons. The first reason concerns the question of how theCritique of Pure Reasonitself should be read. I take the view that in the firstCritiqueKant's primary aim is to determine the conditions of synthetic a priori knowledge rather than to identify the a priori conditions of empirical knowledge. Since metaphysics was traditionally considered to be the discipline that possessed a priori knowledge of things, this view makes good sense of Kant's presentation of theCritique of Pure Reasonas a work intended to transform metaphysics into a science. In this article I hope to clarify the nature of this transformation by determining the elements which Kant's transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolff's ontology, as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. I thus hope to solve some of the riddles posed by Kant's use of the term ‘transcendental philosophy’ in theCritique of Pure Reason.

scholarly journals Toward Pragmatically Naturalized Transcendental Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry And Pragmatic Scientific Realism

2013 ◽  
pp. 79-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami Pihlström
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Representation ◽  
Scientific Practices

This paper seeks to show that the turn toward local scientific practices in the philosophy of science is not a turn away from transcendental investigations. On the contrary, a pragmatist approach can very well be (re)connected with Kantian transcendental examination of the necessary conditions for the possibility of scientific representation and cognition, insofar as the a priori conditions that transcendental philosophy of science examines are understood as historically relative and thus potentially changing. The issue of scientific realism will be considered from this perspective, with special emphasis on Thomas Kuhn's conception of paradigms as frameworks making truth-valued scientific statements possible and on Charles S. Peirce's realism about "real generals". 

Three Kantian Routes to the Synthetic A Priori

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Insufficient Attention ◽  
Synthetic A Priori ◽  
The One ◽  
Philosophical Importance

Abstract Kant influentially distinguished analytic from synthetic a priori propositions, and he took certain propositions in the latter category to be of immense philosophical importance. His distinction between the analytic and the synthetic has been accepted by many and attacked by others; but despite its importance, a number of discussions of it since at least W. V. Quine’s have paid insufficient attention to some of the passages in which Kant draws the distinction. This paper seeks to clarify what appear to be three distinct conceptions of the analytic (and implicitly of the synthetic) that are presented in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and in some other Kantian texts. The conceptions are important in themselves, and their differences are significant even if they are extensionally equivalent. The paper is also aimed at showing how the proposed understanding of these conceptions—and especially the one that has received insufficient attention from philosophers—may bear on how we should conceive the synthetic a priori, in and beyond Kant’s own writings.

scholarly journals Epistemologia Kanta jako rozwiązanie sporu empiryzmu z racjonalizmem

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Ideas

The article concerns some of the most important elements of I. Kant’s epistemology and its connections with earlier epistemological ideas, namely rationalism and empiricism. The history of dispute between rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz) and empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) is hereby shortly presented while Kant’s own philosophical achievements are suggested to be both alternative and synthesis of these. The main core of this paper is summary of basis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; some most important categories are described: apriorism, synthetic and analytical judgements, knowledge a priori and a posteriori, main ideas of transcendental esthetics (two forms of pure intuition: time and space), main ideas of transcendental logic (forms of judgement and twelve categories). Also the meaning of Kant’s „copernican revolution” is presented as a turning point for classical German philosophy as well as for whole modern epistemology.

scholarly journals Transcendental Philosophy as a Research Programme

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-126
Author(s):  
Michael Lewin
Keyword(s):  
Research Programme ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
The Third ◽  
Definite Form ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Insight Into

Transcendental philosophy was not born like Athena out of Zeus’s head, mature and in full armour from the very beginning. That is why in both prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant introduces the concept of transcendental philosophy as an “idea.” The idea understood architectonically develops slowly and only gradually acquires a definite form. As witnessed by the works of Kant himself and of his predecessors and followers, the idea of transcendental philosophy has undergone a series of changes and adjustments compared to the initial plan. In this context, my goal is not simply exegesis and historical investigation of transcendental philosophy, but also to look at it from a systematic and methodological perspective. I examine the concept of transcendental philosophy from the viewpoint of programmatic metaphilosophy. The first part discusses programmatics as a distinct subsection of metaphilosophy. I argue that Kant’s architectonic methodology and the methodology of Lakatos can be used to understand the inception, development and degradation of philosophical systems. In the second part I look at the project of transcendental philosophy and the stages of its development from the standpoint of architectonics. The third part shows that Lakatos’s methodology can provide a detailed insight into the elements of transcendental philosophy, a clear idea of its logic and identify the component parts that can be improved and developed. In spite of the different levels of detailing and epistemological prerequisites, the methodologies of Kant and Lakatos can be combined to achieve a metaphilosophically informed and progressive understanding of philosophical projects.

Noumenal Causality Reconsidered: Affection, Agency, and Meaning in Kant

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Westphal
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Logical Possibility ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Metaphysical Question ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Common Sense Knowledge

The lead question of Kant's first Critique, indeed his whole Critical Philosophy is ‘How is Metaphysics as a Science Possible?’ Neo-Kantian and recent Anglophone interpretations of Kant's epistemology have concentrated on the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ of the first Critique, and have taken Kant's positive and legitimate sense of metaphysics to concern the necessary conditions of our knowledge of mathematics, natural science, and of course, our common sense knowledge of a spatio-temporal world of objects and events. However, in the ‘Canon of Pure Reason’ in the first Critique Kant indicates quite clearly that, although two of the leading sub-questions of metaphysics — ‘What should I so?’ and ‘What may I hope?’ — cannot be answered on theoretical grounds, they may be answered on practical grounds (A804-05=B832-33). Those practical grounds are elaborated and supplemented (mainly) in the latter two Critiques and the Religion. In each case, however, a definite and positive answer to a metaphysical question involves giving ‘objective reality’ to a concept, e.g., the concepts of freedom or immortality. ‘Objective reality’ involves possible reference to an object, where ‘possible reference’ involves more than merely describing a logical possibility.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document