The Transcendental Self

Key Terms

Fichte, J.G.
Transcendental Idealism,
Moral Deliberation,
Selfhood
Transcendental Self
Transcendentalism
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pragmatism
Phenomenology
Transcendental Subjectivity
Intersubjectivity
Transcendental Intersubjectivity
Transcendental Phenomenology
Kant
Fichte
Hegel
Nietzsche
Husserl
Heidegger
Merleau-Ponty
Wittgenstein
the Stoics
Rüdiger Bubner
Self-Referentiality
Dynamic principles
Contingency
Transcendental
Critique of Pure Reason
Edmund Husserl
Paul Natorp

Key Researchers

Sebastian Luft
David Carr
Günter Zöller
Gabriele Gava
Robert Stern
Sebastian Gardner
Matthew Grist
Dermot Moran

Source: The Persistent Problems of Philosophy

The Transcendental Turn

Source: The Transcendental Turn/Introduction

Phenomenology and the Transcendental

Source: Phenomenology and the Transcendental

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Key Sources of Research

The Coherence of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

By Yaron M. Senderowicz

Transcendental self-consciousness.

Cassam, Quassim (1995)

In: Sen, Pranab Kumar and Verma, Roop Rekha, (eds.) The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson. New Delhi : Bombay: Indian Council of Philosophical Research ; Distributed by Allied Publishers. ISBN 9788185636160

The Transcendental Turn

Sebastian Gardner and Matthew Grist (eds.), The Transcendental Turn, Oxford University Press, 2015, 380pp., ISBN 9780198724872.

Reviewed by Robert Howell, University at Albany, SUNY, and Moscow State University

2016.01.24

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-transcendental-turn/

Source: The Transcendental Turn

The idea of a special “transcendental knowledge,” an autonomous philosophical cognition that marks out necessary structures in our knowledge and its objects, goes back to Kant. The idea continues in the nineteenth century and is stressed anew by Husserl (who introduces the talk of a transcendental turn) and his successors. The present volume is part of a revived interest in such philosophy among Anglophone thinkers in the past fifty or so years. It derives from a research project organized by the late Mark Sacks.

The volume collects important studies on the relations of key European thinkers to the transcendental tradition: Kant (essays by Henry E. Allison, Karl Ameriks, Paul Abela); Fichte (Daniel Breazeale, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Paul Guyer); Hegel (Robert Pippin, Stephen Houlgate); Nietzsche (Béatrice Han-Pile); Husserl, phenomenology, and Heidegger (Dan Zahavi, Steven Crowell, Taylor Carman, Cristina Lafont); Merleau-Ponty (Sebastian Gardner); Wittgenstein (Stephen Mulhall); and (as a pre-Kantian predecessor) the Stoics (Wayne M. Martin). Gardner contributes an introduction. The essays are intended to elucidate the thought of these thinkers and the extent to which they belong to a transcendental tradition incorporating metaphilosophical views deriving from Kant. It is impossible to do full justice here to any of the discussions, but I will note main points and various questions that arise.

In the first Critique, Kant describes transcendental cognition as an (i) a priori, (ii) second-order investigation into the nature of our a priori knowledge. (iii) This investigation examines the cognitive faculties of the knowing subjects. (iv) Its characteristic mode of argument is “transcendental proof,” which establishes conditions necessary for the possibility of knowledge. (v) The Copernican Revolution — objects conform to our a priori knowledge, rather than conversely — encapsulates Kant’s strategy; and (vi) this conformity is understood according to Kant’s transcendental idealism. The authors in this volume tend to stress various features descending from this cluster, although they do not agree on all the details. Kant’s understanding of (v) and (vi) also has been disputed recently, and aspects of that dispute appear in the opening contributions by Allison and Ameriks.

Allison develops a new approach to his earlier nonmetaphysical interpretation of transcendental idealism. This approach is independent of his original interpretation but, for him, helps to explain the attractions of such interpretations. Allison argues that besides using “transcendental” in the Critical way indicated above, Kant also uses it in a traditional ontological fashion to refer to features predicated of all objects in general, of objects “as such.” The traditional ontological framework assumes that space and time apply to objects in general and so with strict universality (28). One might now take Kant’s transcendental turn simply as a move within this framework — a move denying spatiotemporality to any objects in general (regarded as existing in cognition-independent forms) and restricting it to objects as they appear. However, it is preferable to read this turn as a deflationary move rejecting the traditional framework altogether and adopting a new, nonmetaphysical view. That view takes spatiotemporal predicates simply to apply to all objects of our possible experience without introducing any ontologically separate realm of objects in themselves.

Like his original interpretation, Allison’s new approach raises important questions. I believe, however, that this approach is historically mistaken. It appears that space and time are not considered, in the traditional ontology, transcendental predicates that belong universally to objects as such. Thus Baumgarten takes space and time to belong only to composite beings, not to simples (Metaphysica, §§230 ff., §§239-42); and he takes space and time not to belong to God (§§840-42, 849-50).[1] As far as I can tell, there never was an ontological view, utilized by Kant, that attributes space and time flatly to all beings as such, a view that Kant then replaces with Allison’s deflationary treatment. Moreover, Kant’s “concept of an object in general” — a concept which, as far as I know, does not feature in the traditional ontologies — can be used to judge that (as Descartes holds) some entities as such are spatial, but others are not. Kant’s mere use of this concept thus doesn’t support Allison. I also don’t see the philosophical attractions of Allison’s approach, unless it abandons Kant’s idealism altogether and reads him as a realist.

Ameriks wants to distance Kant from extreme forms of a metaphysics of things in themselves while defending the legitimacy of metaphysics within Kant’s position. For Ameriks, the Transcendental Turn claims, nonmetaphysically, that “there are immanently determinable necessary structures of our experience and its objects,” structures discovered by investigating “what is immanently demanded by our own epistemic practices” (36, 35). Kant’s appeal to idealism to explain the existence of these structures is a separate claim that does, however, make metaphysical commitments.

Ameriks proposes a three-level Kantian account. In Hegelian metaphysics, the Concept is the fundamental, unconditioned thing. In Ameriks’ Kantian account, the third, fundamental level consists of things in themselves. On these things depend the second-level things, the spatiotemporal objects that we know. The first level is the private mental items (sensations, thoughts, etc.), through which we know those objects. The second-level things are empirically real but still count as appearances — not because they depend subjectivistically on individual minds, but because (analogously to Hegel’s view) they are conditioned by and so depend on the fundamental level, things in themselves. (Compare the idea that colors, although phenomenally real features of objects, depend on the physical microstructure that determines how objects visually appear.)

Ameriks’ interpretation has many attractions and deserves extended development. Two concerns: first, if Kant’s proofs of idealism fail, we lack good reasons to accept the three-level view as true, although some naturalized version might still be defensible, à la Sellars’ picture of the manifest and scientific images of the world. Second, Ameriks’ interpretation looks like reconstruction, not simple Kant interpretation. There are, for instance, strongly subjectivist elements in Kant that Ameriks’ reading plays down. (Thus, for Kant, I — the I to which objects appear — appear to myself in inner sense as an individual, finite mind; and so on.)

Breazeale and Horstmann describe Fichte’s responses to Kant. Breazeale notes that Fichte’s method of a priori genetic description is meant to fill gaps in Kant’s account of how transcendental philosophy proceeds. By “thinking the I” in self-positing acts, observing what further acts that thinking requires, then observing the requirements of those further acts, and so on, one determines the a priori structure of the world. Breazeale gives a very useful, even-handed account of Fichte’s views and the difficulties that arise.

Horstmann argues that Fichte’s focus on first-person consciousness is part of the German idealists’ attempts to escape skepticism about Kant’s theory. In something of an expositional tour de force, he surveys major Fichtean arguments in theWissenschaftslehre from 1794 to after 1800 and provides critical evaluations. Up to around 1800 Fichte tries to ground knowledge in a fact (say, the “A = A” truth) or in an act (of self-positing). After that, he focuses on “absolute knowing.” His thought then becomes extraordinarily obscure. But Horstmann gives comprehensible sketches of main ideas even here. Like Breazeale’s, his essay does an excellent job of explaining Fichte and will help anyone struggling with the texts.

Abela and Guyer focus on ethics. Abela defends the anti-naturalistic force of Kant’s account of moral obligation. However, meeting our moral obligations is, for Kant, framed by the task of realizing the highest good (of making oneself worthy of happiness). Achieving happiness is in fact central to the successful employment of practical reason. Kant’s characterization of that task converges in rewarding ways with current empirical research on happiness.

Guyer examines Fichte’s discussion, in the 1798 System of Ethics, of Kant’s theory of practical reason. Fichte takes transcendental philosophy to discover the structures in experience that are necessary for the possibility of experience. He identifies these structures by appeal to the self’s self-positing actions. Fichte tries, by appeal to those actions, to solve three problems for Kant: (a) demonstrating the holding of the categorical imperative; (b) showing that the moral law manifests itself through a special feeling of respect; (c) making Kant’s proof of freedom compatible with the fact that people sometimes act immorally. Guyer brings out the intrinsic interest of Fichte’s attempts to resolve these problems. The attempts may not fully succeed. But anyone concerned with these issues can benefit from Guyer’s discussion.

With Fichte, we are still close to Kant’s own understanding of transcendental philosophy. The work of Hegel and the later thinkers treated in this volume begins to diverge more sharply from Kant, although crucial aspects of their ideas still derive from his approach.

Pippin updates his influential, nonmetaphysical reading of Hegel. What one might call Hegel’s metaphysics is a “logic” that yields the categories via which we experience the world. Unlike Kant, Hegel doesn’t restrict these categories to human experience or transcendentally deduce them. But he is still a transcendental philosopher. He holds, for example, that “objective purport” (the possibility of reference to objects) requires a categorial structuring of experience.

Pippin argues from this perspective that, without appealing to non-conceptual content, Hegel can account for empirical constraints on knowledge. The self-negation performed by the subject of thought involves the idea that that subject regards its judgments as defeasible. Hegel’s “self-determination of the Concept” allows for individual conceptual views (and the normative authority of conditions of objective purport) to be corrected from the inside, not through nonconceptual experience but through our experience of the partiality of our own conceptions. Pippin covers many related topics in a dense, allusive discussion. He touches elliptically on other significant recent interpretations — for example, accounts of Hegel’s relations to skepticism; and the metaphysical reading mentioned above, which yields a conceptual monism in which the Concept dialectically differentiates into the natural world and our own reasoning and then, in our reasoning, obtains absolute knowledge of itself. Pippin may defend his interpretation as one that makes philosophical sense of central Hegelian points, but the recent interpretations are historically compelling. Readers of Pippin’s essay will learn valuable new things about his ideas. His opponents will hold, however, that he does not make clear how far Hegel’s actual views count as transcendental.

Houlgate argues against treating the Phenomenology of Spirit as Kantian transcendental philosophy. Kant’s transcendental approach identifies, through transcendental arguments, conditions of ordinary consciousness; these arguments depend on premises that Kant simply assumes. But, for Hegel, this appeal to assumptions begs the question against other positions. It also runs contrary to Hegel’s idea that it is through a purely phenomenological, presuppositionless study of the commitments made by ordinary consciousness that we ultimately reach — not Kantian conditions for the possibility of our finite attempts to know individual objects — but the standpoint of absolute knowledge.

Houlgate makes a convincing case. But the discussion is hampered by the differing accounts of “transcendental” that are available. Read liberally, Ameriks’ above characterization can be applied to the Phenomenology, after all. That book shows the rational, necessary structure that is disclosed in our experience. It does so by studying natural consciousness’s increasingly accurate understanding of the epistemic practices that ultimately yield “actual knowledge of what truly is.” So in this sense it counts as transcendental philosophy.

Han-Pile’s essay brings us to a further philosopher whose transcendental bonds have been controverted. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter both argue that Nietzsche begins as a transcendental idealist but eventually adopts naturalism. Han-Pile replies that the texts show that he struggles between such positions throughout his career; he is best read as trying to overcome the transcendental-naturalistic divide. While later rejecting things in themselves, he continues to accept a priori forms that structure objects. But these forms do so not in a traditional, unconditionally necessary way but only relative to our differing perspectives on the world. The forms evolve along with the perspectives; they persist when they preserve and enhance the way of life that embodies them. Han-Pile compares this naturalized a priori to Michel Foucault’s idea of a “historical a priori.”

The interesting idea of a relativized a priori recurs in later essays, and Han-Pile’s discussion throws important light on Nietzsche. However, I suspect that Clark and Leiter will simply respond that Nietzsche sketches a high-level, naturalistic theory of how epistemic perspectives, with their a priori forms, arise for evolutionary reasons and persist to the extent that, pragmatically evaluated, they further our interests. Han-Pile’s apparent rejection of such a reading seems to depend on a narrow view of what counts as naturalistic explanation (see 212, 213).

The phenomenologists’ treatments of the transcendental now come into focus. Zahavi gives a lucid overview of Husserl’s transformations of that notion. For Husserl, phenomenology is transcendental insofar as it explores the essential conditions, within our experience, of objects’ being given to us. Husserl generalizes experience to include all modes of experiencing entities. He criticizes Kant’s approach as metaphysically contaminated and rejects Kant’s transcendental argumentation.

Zahavi also stresses the fundamental importance to Husserl of intersubjectivity. Unlike Kant, Husserl argues that my constitutive acts of positing entities depend on my experience of other subjects. The subject must be socialized and embodied in the world it constitutes. There is no fixed world, only worlds relative to the structures taken as normal within a social tradition. In the end (and consonant with Foucault’s view of phenomenology), Husserl undermines any strict transcendental-empirical distinction. Transcendental and empirical perspectives become complementary, not incompatible.

Crowell describes the development of Heidegger’s work from Husserl’s. Like Zahavi, Crowell takes Husserl to generalize Kant by investigating conditions on the general possibility of our experiencing objects as such-and-such, as having various sorts of meaning. This investigation proceeds through a second-order study of first-person intentional experiences. It is normative: it determines what grounds our claims — defeasible, and so norm-governed — to experience something of a given sort.

Husserl explains such grounds in terms of rule-governed relations among the acts of perception (noeses) that present the object to the subject, anticipate its future appearance, and so on. For Heidegger, such acts are abstractions; they have their identities only as parts of totalities governed by the abilities and skills that the subject exercises on the object. Practical intentionality is thus necessary for act intentionality. But practical intentionality is not sufficient; the object must count as being such-and-such. So I must be able to regard the object as satisfying the norms for being such-and-such. I cannot do that, however, unless I take myself (and my regarding) to be subject to norms, treat myself as able to succeed or fail in my projects. But my so taking myself is not passive; it is a commitment I make. So it is because I can commit myself to norms that things themselves are subjected to norms by me and so are disclosed, in my experience, as being of such-and-such sorts. For Heidegger, phenomenology is thus transcendental insofar as it accounts, in this way, for the possibility of intentionality. Crowell’s rich, compact discussion does an excellent job of elucidating this central Heideggerian train of thought.

Carman examines Heidegger’s view of truth. Heideggerian truth is correctness, correctness being an “uncovering.” Ernst Tugendhat has objected that regarding truth as an unconcealment won’t distinguish truth from falsity. But Heidegger is not giving a theory of truth; he simply describes the kind of experience that motivates us to regard a belief as true. Uncovering is itself a kind of commitment — to regard a belief as true, we must have it. As regards the transcendental, Carman says simply that truth is ontologically fundamental to transcendental philosophy. One wonders about the prospects for a viable Heideggerian account of truth itself. And does regarding a belief as true imply having it? Can’t I take your first belief yesterday to be true without having that belief myself?

Lafont confronts a tension in Being and Time that resembles the one that Han-Pile sees in Nietzsche. As Crowell notes elsewhere, that book is supposed to continue the ahistorical investigations of traditional transcendental philosophy into necessary structures of human experience. But the book also stresses the radical historicity of human existence. In response, Lafont develops her own hermeneutic reading: Heidegger is committed to a priori structures in experience, but structures of a relativized sort.

Heidegger investigates the transcendental conditions of understanding anything as meaningful. Lafont agrees that these general conditions will be universal. But our experiences of entities depend, in a transcendental-idealist way, on our underlying projections of those entities’ structures. These projections vary with our contexts; each projection assumes a particular structure, a priori relative to that projection, which the entities recognized by that projection must satisfy. The result is an incommensurable, idealistic, conceptual pluralism. Heidegger’s relativization of the a priori undermines traditional transcendental readings of his work. But because he still takes our meaning projections to structure our experience of entities, that work remains within the transcendental orbit.

This is an illuminating discussion that raises many questions about Heidegger, questions reinforced by the themes shared with Han-Pile’s essay. Given Lafont’s incommensurabilist interpretation, the concern about the possibility of a Heideggerian account of truth also returns with a vengeance. In addition, Crowell has recently argued that Heidegger can allow for universal norms independent of particular interpretive frameworks. He also criticizes Lafont’s notion of Heidegger’s “hermeneutic idealism”.[2] One hopes that Lafont will respond. This debate raises fundamental issues of interpretation.

Gardner offers a philosophically fascinating account of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. He rejects the “Psychological Interpretation,” which takes Merleau-Ponty’s work to converge with the naturalistic kinds of philosophy of mind that invoke Merleau-Ponty in their studies. On Gardner’s “Transcendental Interpretation,” Merleau-Ponty develops an antinaturalistic form of transcendental philosophy that is committed to a transcendental-idealist metaphysics.

Merleau-Ponty wants to understand perception’s objectual character, its articulation into objects. That character is inexplicable by objective thought. Rather, it is explained by discovering transcendental — a priori, necessary — conditions of experience’s objectual character. Such conditions are necessities present within concrete, pre-objective experience, not externally imposed conceptual forms. The presence of the phenomenal body is such a condition, as is pre-objective perception, given through the body. Moreover, our human existence has features (intersubjectivity, temporality, freedom) that themselves cannot be grasped objectively. For this fact to hold, the world itself must have a pre-objective character. (This is the experienced world, treated idealistically as existing only relative to perceiving subjects; it is this world that is grounded in pre-objective being.) The result is a special transcendental idealism. Empirical reality is not, contra Kant, constituted through intuition and objectivity concepts. Instead, it is given through the pre-objective, perceptual world, which itself is shot through with ambiguities in a way that objective thought cannot capture.

This theory is anti-naturalistic. Merleau-Ponty does not synthesize transcendental philosophy and empirical science. He appeals to psychology simply to free transcendental philosophy from objective-thought misconceptions of perception. The parts of psychology worth saving are to be transformed into phenomenology.

This is an enlightening, comprehensive discussion that makes a forceful case for its conclusions. It should be an asset to everyone interested in Merleau-Ponty. To note three points: (a) even given Gardner’s interpretation, it doesn’t follow — and Gardner doesn’t claim — that Merleau-Ponty’s work shouldn’t continue to function as a resource for naturalistic philosophy of mind. (b) We still need to ask whether Merleau-Ponty’s idealism, distinctive as Gardner shows it to be, is philosophically viable. (c) Merleau-Ponty’s position, as described by Gardner, may be unnaturalizable. Still, naturalistic interpreters will surely propose analogues. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s account might be read as a high-level, but empirically-based, theoretical description of basic relations that obtain among our experiences and their phenomenal objects, those relations holding insofar as our experiences and those objects exist inside the manifest image. That image and those relations would then depend on whatever is the underlying physical reality.

The book concludes with Wittgenstein and the Stoics. Mulhall makes a pointed case against Bernard Williams’ well-known reading of the later Wittgenstein as a transcendental idealist. He demonstrates that Wittgenstein need not be taken to espouse the “first-person plural” idealism that Williams describes, and he develops an attractive alternative reading of Wittgenstein’s grammatical remarks about what “we” say. However, I suspect that much still remains to be determined, beyond this dispute with Williams, about Wittgenstein’s overall transcendental affinities.

Martin notes that from premises about the possibility of certain sorts of experience (desires, perceptions), some Stoics infer the existence of a kind of self-consciousness — namely, the existence of an implicit, nonconceptual understanding of (and concern for) the body and what preserves it. These inferences resemble Kantian arguments from the possibility of experience. So the Stoics develop a proof strategy that leads eventually to Kant’s transcendental proofs and beyond.

Martin is right to investigate possible antecedents to Kant. But the Stoic self-consciousness is implicit and nonconceptual, unlike Kant’s I think; the Stoic claims apply to all animals, not just to beings with discursive understandings; and, as Martin notes, the Stoic arguments aren’t a priori in the Kantian way. Moreover, the abstract argument structure here — from the possibility of exercising quasi-cognitive capacities to logico-metaphysical conclusions about us or the world — is found before the Stoics. Note, for example, Phaedo 74a-76a, arguing for (recollection of) the Forms, and various versions of Aristotle’s defense of noncontradiction. In appealing to specifically conceptual capacities, these arguments seem closer to Kant’s transcendental proofs than does the Stoic reasoning. Yet none of these ancient inferences suggests anything like the Copernican Revolution, and I know no evidence that they influenced Kant. Martin is right in claiming that the Stoics (among other classical thinkers) employ an argument structure that Kant also uses. But in seeing “an ancient precedent for Kant’s transcendental approach” in the Stoics’ work (342), he goes too far, if he goes beyond that specific structural claim.

Martin’s essay leads to a central question for this anthology — what is transcendental philosophy and the “turn”? Individual authors do a fine job of interpreting their philosophers; some of these essays should become standard references for their topics. The authors and their chosen thinkers focus on one or more of the Kantian points noted above, or on descendants of those points, extending or radically transforming them. But they don’t agree on exactly what transcendental philosophy and the turn come to. Is there really a well-defined such philosophy whose delineation will yield historical insights and perhaps new tools for systematic thought?[3]

In the Introduction, and without trying to give an exact definition, Gardner proposes five characteristics of transcendental philosophy. It (a) accepts the need for metaphysics; (b) seeks anti-skeptical foundations; (c) derives such foundations, as conditions of possibility, from the subject’s cognitive powers; (d) views those conditions as forming a logic with a normative character; and (e) uses a distinctive mode of transcendental argumentation.

These characteristics, and Gardner’s subsequent discussion, are interesting. They overlap the six Kantian features noted above. But they drop Kant’s focus on a priori knowledge; they stress metaphysics more than all the transcendental figures in this volume will accept; (b), (c), and (d) don’t seem to be accepted (at least in the same sense) by all the philosophers involved; and (e) is abandoned by at least Nietzsche and the phenomenologists. (Hegel also rejects (e), given Houlgate’s discussion.) Neither Kant’s nor Gardner’s set of features in fact provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the current understandings of “transcendental.” Given this fact and the divergent past uses of the term, I doubt the assumption (which some of Gardner’s later comments seem to suggest) that there is a single definite, theoretically-useful notion of transcendental method that is still awaiting its exact delineation by philosophers.

Perhaps there is such a notion, but the historical development, as evidenced in this volume, suggests a shifting group of features united by their origins in the Kantian cluster noted above and especially in Kant’s idea of a priori conditions for the possibility of knowledge and his notion of the Copernican Revolution. Roughly, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche focus on conditions for the possibility of knowledge of various sorts. The phenomenologists then shift this focus by isolating, within it, the notion of conditions for the possibility of intentionality, of reference to objects. They also generalize by considering such reference wherever it occurs. (Within this shift there then occur further transitions, for example from Kant’s I think to Fichte’s self-positing I-act; to first-person, phenomenological awareness; and beyond.) In both these approaches, the Copernican notion appears that features of the objects experienced are somehow idealistically constituted or otherwise constrained by the structure of our experience.

If this picture of the development of transcendental thought is right, we need more historical as well as systematic study — for example, the role of the neo-Kantians in establishing current conceptions of the transcendental appears central but isn’t considered in this book.[4] Gardner is well aware of the ongoing character of this research; the volume and his introduction are refreshingly open-minded about these issues. But all this needs further investigation.

Finally, what are the prospects for transcendental philosophy, as its development is laid out in this volume? I’ve indicated sympathy for naturalized forms of transcendental theories, and this idea has certainly been pursued by many contemporary analytic thinkers. One will have to see where this project goes — and whether any genuinely autonomous, a priori form of transcendental investigation is still viable. Gardner’s introduction contains thoughtful reflections about such issues. The widespread although not universal acceptance of transcendental idealism by major transcendental philosophers also needs further testing. The tests won’t come just from analytic philosophers, various of whom have of course criticized idealism at least since G. E. Moore. The European New Realists have now opened new lines of attack, and those sympathetic to transcendental idealism need to answer all these criticisms, not just to rehearse the usual arguments. About such idealism Gardner’s introduction also contains stimulating remarks.

Whatever the outcome of these questions, this is a fine anthology of first-rate essays on one of the great sequences of work in modern philosophy. I recommend it wholeheartedly; the fact that it raises such issues is a tribute to its value.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Brad Armour-Garb, Ron McClamrock, Nathan Powers, and Vadim Vasilyev for helpful discussions of these topics.

[1] See Kant, Academy edition, 17:78 ff., 163, 165; Courtney Fugate and John Hymers, trans., Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2013). Scotus recognizes transcendentals that are not common to all beings — e.g., disjunctive transcendentals such as “finite”-“infinite.” See Wouter Goris and Jan Aertsen, “Medieval Theories of Transcendentals” §4.3, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2013. Compare Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §6; “Metaphysik Mrongovius,” 29:784. Baumgarten’s space and time predicates seem to fall here. He defines them in the chapter “Internal disjunctive predicates of a being.” Note also Ameriks, 46-47.

[2] Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[3] Lafont notes Sami Pihlström’s contention that nothing actually distinguishes transcendental from other kinds of philosophy (“Recent Reinterpretations of the Transcendental,” Inquiry, 2004, 47, 289-314).

[4] See Frederick Beiser on Hermann Cohen’s “discovery of the transcendental” in The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and the Theory of Apperception: New …

edited by Giuseppe Motta, Dennis Schulting, Udo Thiel

Transcendental Self: A Comparative Study of Thoreau and the Psycho-Philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism

Pillai, A. K. B.

ISBN 10: 0819145734 ISBN 13: 9780819145734

Publisher: Univ Pr of Amer, 1985

Immanuel Kant: The Self as Transcendental Unity

Author: Levin, Jerome D. Ph.D.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

“TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM’S THEORY OF SELFHOOD: FICHTE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN KNOWING ONESELF AND MORAL DELIBERATION”

Buchanan, Caroline Ann,

(2017). Theses and Dissertations–Philosophy. 15.

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/philosophy_etds/15/

Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy

edited by Gabriele Gava, Robert Stern

Source: Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy

Kantian Reflections on the Givenness of Zahavi’s Minimal Experiential Self,

James R. O’Shea (2015)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 23:5, 619-625,

DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2015.1096295

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09672559.2015.1096295?src=recsys

Abstract

At the core of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a decisive break with certain fundamental Cartesian assumptions or claims about consciousness and self-consciousness, claims that have nonetheless remained perennially tempting, from a phenomenological perspective, independently of any further questions concerning the metaphysics of mind and its place in nature. The core of this philosophical problem has recently been helpfully exposed and insightfully probed in Dan Zahavi’s book, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (OUP, 2014). In these remarks I suggest that Zahavi’s view of what he calls ‘The Experiential Self’ defends precisely the sorts of claims to which a Kantian account of consciousness is fundamentally opposed, and while assessing the overall merits of the two contrasting outlooks is no easy matter, I side with the Kantian view.

Kant on Empirical Self-Consciousness,

Janum Sethi (2021)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2021.1948083

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048402.2021.1948083

ABSTRACT

Kant is said to be the first to distinguish between consciousness of oneself as the subject of one’s experiences and consciousness of oneself as an object, which he calls transcendental and empirical apperception, respectively. Of these, it is empirical apperception that is meant to enable consciousness of any empirical features of oneself; what this amounts to, however, continues to puzzle interpreters. I argue that a key to understanding what empirical apperception consists in is Kant’s claim that each type of apperception corresponds to a distinct type of unity of apperception—that is, a distinct way in which representations can be related for a subject. Whereas transcendental unity of apperception requires that representations be actively combined by the understanding, empirical unity of apperception obtains when representations are passively combined by the reproductive imagination. In light of this, I develop a novel account of Kant’s two types of apperception, according to which they correspond to a cognitive subject’s consciousness of two essential aspects of herself—namely, her spontaneity and receptivity.

Notes

1 Kant characterizes apperception in general as a subject’s consciousness of itself (B68, A107, B132).

2 Versions of this view are suggested by Smith [Citation1923: 293–4], Mohr [Citation1991: 104–5, 157–8], Brook [Citation1994: 56–7, 66–7, 78], Ameriks [Citation2000: 252–4], Sturm [Citation2001: 174], Allison [Citation2004: 277–80], Rosefeldt [Citation2006: 287], Sturm and Wunderlich [Citation2010: 55], Kitcher [Citation2011: 25–6, 129, 159], Schmitz [Citation2013: 1058], Renz [Citation2015: esp. 593–4], Bader [Citation2017: 132], Longuenesse [Citation2017: 91, 110], Kraus [Citation2019: 172, 190], and Khurana [Citation2019: 964]. A variant treats empirical apperception through inner sense as a subject’s awareness of any of her representings as acts of awareness [Weldon Citation1958: 261–2; Wolff Citation1963: 198–9]. Longuenesse [2006: 302] briefly lists possible readings of EA, one of which is similar to the view that I defend. While the correspondence between EA and the empirical unity of apperception is central to my view, however, Longuenesse’s alternative takes the representations of which the subject is conscious in EA to stand in the transcendental unity of apperception [ibid.: 305]. Keller [Citation1998] and Valaris [Citation2008] argue that EA, through inner sense, makes a subject aware of her ‘point of view’ on outer experience. As Valaris notes, this reading is an ‘inference to the best explanation’ [ibid.: 3] and not directly supported by Kant’s text. I will argue that the text directly supports a different reading.

3 Kant also calls TUA the original/pure/synthetic/objective unity of apperception/consciousness/self-consciousness (A107, B139–40, B135–6) and EUA the subjective unity of apperception/consciousness (B139–40).

4 Arguably, Kant allows that representations can be united in one consciousness—namely, when a subject has representations that bear some relation to each other—without being united for that consciousness—that is, without the subject being aware of her representations as so related. See note 8.

5 It might be objected that Kant is not claiming here that EUA obtains prior to combination by the understanding, but only that the manifold of intuition is given for combination through inner sense. While the sentence in question is ambiguous, I believe that my reading is preferred when read together with the subsequent sentence that I highlight below, in which Kant claims that EUA obtains through association of representations. As I will discuss, he argues that association by the imagination in the synthesis of reproduction is necessary for and precedes the synthesis of the understanding by which the manifold of intuition is united in a concept of the object. This reading is also supported by Kant’s claim in §8 that ‘consciousness of itself (apperception)’ through inner sense—i.e. EA—’requires inner perception of the manifold that is antecedently [vorher] given in the subject, and the manner in which this is given in the mind without spontaneity’ (B68, my emphases). This suggests that EA—like EUA, which it accompanies—requires consciousness of intuitions as they are given prior to combination by the understanding. I thank two anonymous referees for urging me to defend my reading of this sentence.

6 Schmitz does argue that what one is aware of through inner sense is temporally ordered outer intuitions[Citation2013: 1052]. She does not, however, discuss EUA, or its relation to association.

7 As I explain in section 3.1, Kant does argue that association by the reproductive imagination plays an essential role in awareness of a temporal series of intuitions as a series. But the Standard View does not recognize this connection between awareness of temporal relations and association. Kitcher notes that EUAis said to occur through association. She does not, however, connect it to EA, but treats it as a ‘special case’ of TUA that is ‘irrelevant to cognition’ [Citation2011: 158–9]. I disagree with both claims. First, as I will discuss, Kant identifies TUA with the objective unity of consciousness, which requires that representations be fully determined by the understanding. In contrast, EUA is a merely subjective unity of consciousness that obtains in merely associated representations that are not fully determined by the understanding. Thus, EUA cannot be an instance of TUA. Second, I will argue that, far from being irrelevant to cognition, EUA underlies cognition of both outer objects and the self.

8 To satisfy this condition, S need not be aware that intuitions are associated. It is sufficient that (1) S is aware of the temporal relations between a set of intuitions; (2) these temporal relations obtain merely because of corresponding associations; and (3) S does not judge whether these temporal relations are required in light of the objects that the intuitions are of. I explain (3) in sections 3.3 and 3.4.

9 Since I do not have space to discuss the difference between ‘intuition’ and ‘perception’, I treat these terms interchangeably. See Tolley [Citation2020] for discussion.

10 See Strawson [Citation1970] and Matherne [Citation2015].

11 This is compatible with the claim, defended, e.g., by Allais, that intuition alone suffices to presentparticulars in some sense to a subject. As Allais allows, this is consistent with its being the case that perceivingsomething requires the subject to be aware that she is doing so [Citation2017: 26].

12 Of course, it is possible to be aware of smoke after being aware of fire, without coming to be aware thatone is aware of smoke after being aware of fire. Animals have the former kind of awareness without the latter. See McLear [Citation2011].

13 Thus, I disagree with Valaris’s claim that consciousness of a ‘temporal series of outer perceptions in me’ just is consciousness of ‘temporal goings on outside me’ [Citation2008: 15]. I can be aware of a representation as of fire followed by a representation as of smoke, without judging that these representations correspond to an actual succession of fire and smoke outside me.

14 See Longuenesse [Citation1998: 212–25], Allison [Citation2004: 189–92], Longuenesse [Citation2005: 64–78], and Messina [Citation2014] for discussions of the role that the understanding plays in determining pure intuitions of space and time.

15 Henceforth, I typically avoid confusion by using the generic term ‘representation’ rather than ‘intuition’ to mark that—as discussed above—the awareness in question involves the understanding.

16 Recall Kant’s claim that apprehension is inseparable from reproduction.

17 That is, although P was only perceived at t₁, since Q was perceived at t₂, and Q inheres in P, P must exist at t₂.

18 §18 is entitled ‘What objective unity of self-consciousness is’ and begins thus (B139, see also B137, A105–8):

The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all of the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object. It is called objective on that account, and must be distinguished from the subjective unity of consciousness …

19 Since my main focus in this paper is on EUA, I set aside questions about how pure intuitions are determined by the understanding.

20 More specifically, this requires that no element of the set is left undetermined by a category. Kant argues that the objective unity of consciousness (i.e. TUA) requires that intuitions be determined ‘with regard not only to one, but rather to all the logical functions of judgment’ (R5932, 18: 391). This cannot mean that every intuition must be subsumed under all twelve categories, since some are incompatible. Rather, it (and its relations) must be determined by at least one category from each of the four titles. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this question.

21 One might object that this conflicts with Kant’s claim in §15 that application of the categories presupposes a still ‘higher’ unity (B131). While I do not have space for a full discussion, I take Kant’s main point to be that the unity of TUA ultimately depends on the identity of the act of uniting representations in one consciousness: that is, it depends on the same subject being conscious of each representation and of uniting them. That identity is presupposed by, and is in that sense ‘higher’ than, any particular act of categorial unification performed by a subject (see A107, B413). However, Kant is clear that the subject only comes to be conscious of the identity of her acts in virtue of performing them——i.e. through combining representations in accordance with the categories (A108; see also B133–5). Each such act generates representations that are instances of TUA. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising these issues.

22 The distinction that I am drawing here appears to cut across the two types of unity discussed by McLear [Citation2015]. On the one hand, EUA is a unity brought about by sensibility (broadly construed to include the reproductive imagination), independently of the understanding (although, as I have noted, application of the mathematical categories is necessary in order for the subject to think of EUA as a determinate unity). Moreover, in being conscious of EUA, the subject does not think of the combination of representations as required by the objects that the representations are of. In both respects, EUA is closer to what McLear calls ‘aesthetic unity’. However, it is not a unity for which the whole is prior to its parts; rather, as with what McLear calls ‘discursive unity’, the whole is composed out of the intuitions that are its parts.

23 One exception is Tolley, who carefully distinguishes between perception and cognition. He does not, however, identify the former with EUA, and appears to ascribe unity of apperception as such to the understanding [Citation2020: 3227n27].

24 Thiel notes that, in addition to a ‘substantial unity’ of the self and a unity that is ‘a necessary condition of mental activity’, Tetens—whose views on self-consciousness are widely believed to have influenced Kant’s—also identifies a unity of the self that is ‘psychological’ and ‘observed’ [Citation2015: 157–8, Citation2018: 68–71]. In contrast, Thiel claims that, for Kant, there is no ‘observed unity’ of the psychological self based on inner sense alone [Citation2015: 159, Citation2018: 73]. But this at least partially overlooks Kant’s distinction between TUA and EUA. Although EUA does not itself afford awareness of an identical self, Kant explicitly characterizes it as a type of unity of apperception that is both passively observed and governed by psychological laws. On my view, there is an important similarity here between Kant and Tetens.

25 I have modified the Guyer/Wood translation to read ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. ‘Wenn’ is ambiguous between the two; however, the former better conveys that this judgment reports that a sequence of representations is ‘found together in perception’.

26 I take the former to be expressed by what Kant calls a ‘judgment of perception’ and the latter by a ‘judgment of experience’ (Pr., 4:299–301). See Sethi [Citation2020] for a full defence.

27 A related question asks whether the reproductive imagination can generate a genuine unity of consciousness. I believe that it can: Kant speaks specifically of the ‘unity of association’ (A121) and the ‘empirical unity of consciousness’ that results when perceptions are ‘combined by the imagination’ (R5933, 18: 392; see also B139–40), claiming neither that such unities are impossible nor that they are simply instances of the objective unity of the understanding. Rather, he describes them as subjective unities, albeit ones of which one can be conscious as unities only on the basis of an ‘objective ground’—namely, the unity of time in which they are represented (which itself depends on TA [B140]). See also note 39.

28 E.g. A194/B239, A156/B195, A201–2/B247, A368. Representations lack ‘relation to an object’ when they are not judged to correspond to an object that the representations are of. See Tolley [Citation2020].

29 E.g. A53/B77, A201–2/B247, A376; Anthropology 7:133–7, 7:180, 7:208, 7:240n21, 7:241; CJ, e.g., 5:230, 5:243–5, 5:256, 5:317, 5:321, 5:323, 5:350, R6315, 18:621. Cf. A239/B298.

30 Kant draws a related—but, I believe, different—distinction between the active and passive self in his discussion of self-affection (B153). There, his main point seems to be that, in EA, the self is both the active subject of consciousness and the passive object that is affected and given to consciousness (see B68, 20:270). The contrast in the Anthropology goes further and concerns whether the subject is active or passive with respect to the manifold of intuition in general. I discuss self-affection in note 47.

31 Boyle also claims that Kant distinguishes between knowledge of the self as active and as passive. Since Boyle’s goals are not exegetical [Citation2009: 134], however, he does not fully defend this reading. Moreover, he takes knowledge of the self as passive to consist merely in knowledge of one’s sensations and appetites, and he does not mention EUA or the imagination’s role in producing it. On my view, both are central to EA as awareness of a unity of representations that is passively brought about.

32 Note Kant’s description of a ‘play of impressions’ as those that occur ‘from nature’ rather than through the subject’s activity.

33 Or, less ambiguously, ‘When I represent a body, I represent weight.’

34 Although Kant paradigmatically describes TA as accompanying acts of unifying intuitions, it also accompanies acts of combining mere concepts (A79/B105, R6311,18:610–11).

35 One might worry that this definition is not general enough, since it ties TA to the understanding in particular, rather than to theoretical reasoning in general. I believe that the text supports this: Kant consistently links TA with the understanding, even substituting the former for the latter (A94/B127, 18:272, 23:18). Although I cannot fully defend this, I don’t take this to mean that there are uses of reason not accompanied by TA. For one, the principles of theoretical reason serve precisely to regulate uses of the understanding (A665–6/B693–4). As for thoughts involving ideas of reason, these are akin to thoughts involving concepts without intuitions. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for urging me to consider the applicability of TA in contexts other than the synthesis of intuitions.

36 Here, one might point out that it is equally true on my view, as on the Standard View, that consciousness of EA is a consciousness of representations qua representations (although we disagree about whichrepresentations). The phrase ‘qua representations’ is employed by the Standard View to flag that, in EA, the subject turns her attention away from the objects represented by fully synthesized representations to the very same fully synthesized representations qua representations in time. In contrast, my view does not hold representations fixed across TA and EA: I have argued that TUA requires a further act of subsuming representations with EUA under the relational categories. Thus, the phrase ‘qua representations’ is not needed to capture the difference between EA and TA, on my view, although neither is it inaccurate. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing this point.

37 On Hoppe’s reading, in contrast, Kant denies that there can be any non-objective unity of consciousness [Citation1983: 129–40, 221–2] and considers consciousness of non-objective states to be entirely separate and scattered [ibid.: 132ff.].

38 See Corr. 11:52 and McLear [Citation2011].

39 The fact that our capacities for TA and EA depend on each other in these ways does not entail that there is no in-principle difference between them. I have argued that TA and EA, respectively, accompany awareness of two types of unity that, Kant makes clear, are in-principle different: TUA is an objective unity fully determined by the understanding, and EUA is a merely subjective unity due to association by the imagination. Now, as discussed, in order for S to be aware of a merely associated series of representations in time as a unity (i.e. in EUA), she must represent time itself as a unity (i.e. in TUA). Moreover, in order to ascribe a merely associated series of representations to herself, she must be able to think of herself as the identical subject who can actively bring those representations into TUA. But the fact that her awareness of EUA depends in these ways on her capacity to bring representations into TUA does not entail that merely associated representations themselves are already in TUA, precisely because they are merely associated. Nor should the difference between TUA and EUA be thought to be one of degree. No increase in the degree of associative unity between representations can bring them into objective unity; rather, what is required is an act of a fundamentally different kind—an act of the understanding, rather than of the reproductive imagination.

40 Thus, I agree with Dyck that consciousness of myself as I appear (i.e. EA) is a necessary component of every perception. For Dyck, however, this is because the former consists in awareness of ‘the unity of time as an object’ [Citation2006: 43], which he claims to obtain through the active unification of successive acts of attention that accompany the synthesis of apprehension. On my view, whereas EA depends on awareness of time as a unity, it is not identical with it.

41 Of course, experience does not require that the subject actually self-ascribe either transcendental or empirical unities. Rather, it presupposes the kind of awareness that makes such self-ascription possible.

42 I believe that my account also aligns better with Kant’s conception of the ethical subject. In the Groundwork [4:452], he says that

a rational being … has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and cognize laws for the use of his powers … first, insofar as he belongs to the world of sense, under laws of nature (heteronomy); second, as belonging to the intelligible world, under laws which … [are] grounded merely in reason.

The former are ‘law[s] of desires and inclinations’ (4:453); the latter, laws of morality. This accords well with my claim that the cognitive subject also has two standpoints from which she is conscious of herself as governed by natural laws of receptivity and rational laws of spontaneity, respectively. Indeed, Kant himself draws this parallel at 4:451. See also Choi [Citation2019].

43 Nayak and Sotnak [Citation1995: 149] and Emundts [Citation2007: 197] claim that the category of causality is not applicable to inner sense. I disagree. First, Kant repeatedly describes representations as the effects of causes, both external and internal (e.g. A98, B276, A368). Second, he makes clear that inner perceptions are governed by laws of nature, such as the psychological laws of association. (e.g. B141–2, B152; Pr. 4:295; Anthr. 7:140–1). Third, contra Nayak and Sotnak, the Second Analogy does not argue that it is necessary to distinguish between a subjective and objective succession in order to apply the category of cause; it claims only that the latter is necessary for the former. Finally, despite initially suggesting otherwise, the discussion at B291–2 concludes (in line with the Refutation of Idealism) that we can think of the succession of inner states as alterations (and therefore as caused) if something persistent is given in outer intuition (see also 18: 611). See Hatfield [Citation1992] and Frierson [Citation2014] for discussion of Kant’s empirical psychology, and Sturm [Citation2001] for further criticisms of Nayak and Sotnak’s claim. See also Chignell [Citation2017].

44 Frierson argues that Kant allows empirical application of the category of substance to the soul [Citation2014: 21–6), whereas Kraus [Citation2019] argues that such application is merely regulative.

45 Representations bear causal relations not only to other representations, but also to objects. Plausibly, the latter type of relation also falls under the scope of empirical psychology, although I cannot explore this further here.

46 My emphasis on the natural laws of psychology might seem to draw my view close to ‘empiricist’ accounts of Kant’s theory of mind, defended, e.g., by Kitcher [Citation1990] and Brook [Citation1994]. There are some crucial differences, however. Most importantly, to the extent that Kitcher and Brook seek to give empiricist accounts, it is of the operation of all of Kant’s mental faculties, especially the activity of the understanding by which representations are brought into TUA, which they take to be governed by causal psychological laws [Kitcher Citation1990: 83, 122–3; Brook Citation1994: 5–7, 35]. Second, both discuss only briefly EA and inner experience, and appear to endorse versions of what I call the Standard View (see note 2). Finally, neither takes Kant’s empirical psychology and the laws of association to be relevant to cognition [Kitcher Citation1990: 77–9, 153ff.; Brook Citation1994: 8–9, 106–7, 135]. In contrast, I have argued that psychological laws govern only the syntheses of the reproductive imagination by which representations come to have EUA, whereas the subject brings representations into TUA in accordance with rational laws of the understanding (see note 47). Indeed, I take the difference between the kind of law that governs them to be crucial to the distinction between TUA and EUA. Moreover, I argue that it is precisely the laws of empirical psychology that underlie self-cognition.

47 One might object that this does not go far enough: surely it must also be possible to situate the activesubject and her judgments in time? On my view, however, a judgment is essentially an act of the understanding for Kant, rather than an item that can be grasped through inner sense, and I do not think that he regards these acts as events in time. For one, everything that occurs in time is governed by laws of nature, whereas acts of the understanding are governed by rational laws (see McLear [Citation2020]). Second, in a Reflexionthat asks ‘Is it an experience that we think?’, Kant argues that, since the acts of thinking that constitute experience involve determining the objective position of events in time, if they were themselves in time then it would have to be in a different, higher-order time in which the acts of first-order time-determination occurred. He concludes that this is absurd, and so that thinking itself is not experienced in time (R5661, 18:318–19; see R6311, where he indicates that mere thoughts without intuitions do not affect inner sense [18:611]). Third, he makes clear that it is only through her empirical character that the subject belongs to the phenomenal world, whereas the ‘actions and inner determinations’ that the subject is conscious of through ‘pure apperception … cannot be accounted at all among impressions of sense’ (A546–7/B574–5). How does this square with Kant’s doctrine of self-affection? In the above Reflexion, he says that, whereas consciousness of a mere thought of a square is not an experience, ‘this thought brings forth an object of experience or a determination of the mind that can be observed, insofar, namely, as it is affected through the faculty of thinking’ (18:319). Although it might seem like Kant is claiming here that the mere thought of a square can be observed, I believe that his point is rather that this thought only becomes an experience when an a priori intuition of a square is added to it through the imagination (see also B154). This is why Kant continues that, through this experience, one can ‘demonstrate [the square’s] properties’, since geometrical demonstration always requires construction in intuition for him. Space restrictions prevent me from further exploring his vexed doctrine of self-affection, but I do not believe that it amounts to the claim that thinking in general can be observed through inner sense. Rather, Kant ties self-affection in particular to the figurative synthesis (B153–4) and the successive acts of apprehension through which the manifold of intuition is grasped in time through inner sense. The latter enable consciousness of the subjective series of perceptions. As Kant says ([Leningrad Fragment on Inner Sense, tr. in Notes and Fragments, 366; see also B155, 20:270, and Dyck [Citation2006]):

That we can affect ourselves … is possible only through our apprehending the representations of things that affect us, i.e., of outer things, for thereby do we affect ourselves, and time is properly the form of the apprehension of representations which are related to something outside us.

My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing these points.

48 I first formulated the main ideas in this paper as part of the core argument of my dissertation. I am indebted to my advisors, Hannah Ginsborg and Daniel Warren, for their invaluable guidance and insight. For discussion, advice, or comments on various stages of the paper’s development, I am very grateful to Gordon Belot, Richard Booth, Matt Boyle, Sarah Buss, Victor Caston, Peter Epstein, Patrick Frierson, Katharina Kraus, Olga Lenczewska, Béatrice Longuenesse, Ishani Maitra, Colin Marshall, Laura Ruetsche, Tad Schmaltz, Umrao Sethi, Clinton Tolley, Jessica Williams, the NAKS Workshop for Junior Women Scholars, audiences at the 2021 Pacific APA, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Clark University, as well as two anonymous referees for this journal.

TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECT VS. EMPIRICAL SELF: ON KANT’S ACCOUNT OF SUBJECTIVITY

SIYAVES AZERI, Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

FILOZOFIA 65, 2010, No 3, p. 269

Click to access 269-283.pdf

“Transcendental Idealism and the Self-Knowledge Premise”

Tse, Chiu Yui Plato.

Journal of Transcendental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 19-41. https://doi.org/10.1515/jtph-2019-0014

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jtph-2019-0014/html?lang=en

“Transcendental Idealism and Naturalism: The Case of Fichte”

Phillips, Rory Lawrence.

Journal of Transcendental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 43-62. https://doi.org/10.1515/jtph-2019-0013

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jtph-2019-0013/html

The meaning of transcendental idealism is as disputed as the truth of it. Kant tells us that transcendental idealism is both a doctrine about 1) the empirical reality but transcendental ideality of space and time, and 2) the distinction between things in themselves and appearances.^[1] Kant is keen to distinguish his own position from other forms of idealism, mainly on the grounds that transcendental idealism does not, on many standard pictures of the view, reduce the world to our mental contents only.^[2] There has been a wide-ranging debate over the nature of transcendental idealism and whether it has metaphysical commitment or is essentially an epistemic position.^[3] For the purposes of this paper, I need not take a stance on whether any of these readings are correct about Kant, because Fichte denies (at least, on the standard story) that things in themselves exist – which are necessary for Kant’s version of transcendental idealism.^[4] Instead, Fichte argues that we have no need of such things, because philosophy as Wissenschaftselehre can help us to see that experience can be explained by reference to the subject – that is, by reference to general conditions on subjectivity only. Fichte is then seen as the ultimate philosophical champion of the freedom and independence of pure selfhood in the face of any and all external factors or influence. In the standard narrative of German Idealism, this account convinced the young Schelling, who, in his early essays was a follower of Fichte, but then Schelling became convinced of the necessity of a philosophical account of nature to complement transcendental idealism.^[5] Soon after this, Schelling turned toward giving his Naturphilosophie philosophical priority over transcendental idealism.^[6] This, inter alia, led to Schelling and Hegel’s co-operation and eventually the development of Hegelian philosophy.^[7] The rest, as they say, is history.

Self-referentiality in Kant’s transcendental philosophy

Is part of
Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress ; vol. 1, Memphis (Tenn.), 1995, pp. 259-267.
Publisher(s) Marquette University Press 1995
Author(s) Piché, Claude

https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/21452

Abstract(s)

Inspired by the thesis of Rüdiger Bubner according to which Kant’s argumentation in the Transcendental Deduction is self-referential, I propose to extend the scope of this thesis to the transcendental Analytic as a whole. The question at stake is: What are the rules that guide transcendental critique if it is not to transgress the finiteness of its standpoint? I suggest that they are to be found in the dynamic Principles of the Analytic since these are also valid, mutatis mutandis, for the transcendental critique that describes them. In other words: these Principles are self-referential. For instance Kant claims that they are necessary for experience in general, but that their application is “contingent” (A 160/B 199). They are not necessary in themselves, no more than a necessary cause within experience is in itself necessary, but rather contingent, i.e.: dependent on another cause, as the principle of causality specifies. Now the dynamic principles are themselves contingent in their implementation, that is: dependent on the material conditions of experience in general. The transcendental conditions here are conditioned by the empirical conditions.

WHY TIME IS IN YOUR MIND: TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AND THE REALITY OF TIME

Guus Duindam

Why Time Is In Your Mind: Transcendental Idealism and the Reality of Time

The varieties of self-transcendent experience

David Bryce Yaden, Jonathan Haidt, Ralph W. Hood, David R. Vago, Andrew B. Newberg

https://pure.johnshopkins.edu/en/publications/the-varieties-of-self-transcendent-experience

Abstract

Various forms of self-loss have been described as aspects of mental illness (e.g., depersonalization disorder), but might self-loss also be related to mental health? In this integrative review and proposed organizational framework, we focus on self-transcendent experiences (STEs)—transient mental states marked by decreased self-salience and increased feelings of connectedness. We first identify common psychological constructs that contain a self-transcendent aspect, including mindfulness, flow, peak experiences, mystical-type experiences, and certain positive emotions (e.g., love, awe). We then propose psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that may mediate the effects of STEs based on a review of the extant literature from social psychology, clinical psychology, and affective neuroscience. We conclude with future directions for further empirical research on these experiences.

On the Metaphysics and Ethics of the Transcendental Self

Sami Johannes Pihlström

Faculty of Theology

In Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy
Editors Gabriele Gava, Robert Stern
Publisher Routledge – Taylor & Francis Group
Publication date 2015
ISBN (Print) 978-1-13-879191-6

https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/on-the-metaphysics-and-ethics-of-the-transcendental-self

Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology

by Sebastian Luft

Book

Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology contributes to discussions about Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in light of the ongoing publication of his manuscripts. It accounts for the historical origins and influence of the phenomenological project by articulating Husserl’s relationship to authors who came before and after him. Finally, it argues for the viability of the phenomenological project as conceived by Husserl in his later years, showing that Husserlian phenomenology is not exhausted in its early, Cartesian perspective, which is indeed its weakest and most vulnerable perspective. Rather, Sebastian Luft convincingly argues, Husserlian phenomenology is a robust and philosophically necessary approach when considered from its late, hermeneutic perspective.

The key point Luft brings into focus is that Husserl’s hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct from other hermeneutic philosophers’, namely Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Unlike them, Husserl’s focus centers on the work subjects must do in order to uncover the prejudices that guide their unreflective relationship to the world. Luft also demonstrates that there is a deep consistency within Husserl’s own writings—from early to late—around the guiding themes of the natural attitude, the need and function of the epoché, and the split between egos, where the transcendental self (distinct from the natural self) is seen as the fundamental ability we all have to inquire into the genesis of our tradition-laden attitudes toward the world.

INTRODUCTION PART I. HUSSERL: THE OUTLINES OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL SYSTEM
Chapter 1. Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude
Chapter 2. Husserl’s Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between Lifeworld and Cartesianism
Chapter 3. Some Methodological Problems Arising in Husserl’s Late Reflections on the Phenomenological Reduction
Chapter 4. Facticity and Historicity as Constituents of the Lifeworld in Husserl’s Late Philosophy
Chapter 5. Husserl’s Concept of the “Transcendental Person.” Another Look at the Husserl-Heidegger Relationship
Chapter 6. Dialectics of the Absolute: The Systematics of the Phenomenological System in Husserl’s Last Period

PART II. HUSSERL, KANT, AND NEO-KANTIANISM: FROM SUBJECTIVITY TO LIFEWORLD AS A WORLD OF CULTURE
Chapter 7. From Being to Givenness and Back: Some Remarks on the Meaning of Transcendental Idealism in Kant and Husserl
Chapter 8. Reconstruction and Reduction: Natorp and Husserl on Method and the Question of Subjectivity
Chapter 9. A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Subjective and Objective Spirit: Husserl, Natorp, and Cassirer
Chapter 10. Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Between Reason and Relativism. A Critical Appraisal

PART III. TOWARDS AN HUSSERLIAN HERMENEUTICS
Chapter 11. The Subjectivity of Effective Consciousness and the Suppressed Husserlian Elements in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics
Chapter 12. Husserl’s “Hermeneutical Phenomenology” as a Philosophy of Culture

Bibliography

Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, and: Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness (review)

Günter Zöller

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Johns Hopkins University Press

Volume 30, Number 4, October 1992

pp. 619-621

10.1353/hph.1992.0077

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/226187

Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Idealism

IEP

Kant: Transcendental Idealism

My Subconscious Mind: A Path To The Transcendental Self

by Stuart Alan Williams (Author)

The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition 1st Edition

by David Carr (Author)

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (June 3, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195126904
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195126907

Much effort in recent philosophy has been devoted to attacking the metaphysics of the subject. Identified largely with French post-structuralist thought, yet stemming primarily from the influential work of the later Heidegger, this attack has taken the form of a sweeping denunciation of the whole tradition of modern philosophy from Descartes through Nietzsche, Husserl, and Existentialism. In this timely study, David Carr contends that this discussion has overlooked and eventually lost sight of the distinction between modern metaphysics and the tradition of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant and continued by Husserl into the twentieth century. Carr maintains that the transcendental tradition, often misinterpreted as a mere alternative version of the metaphysics of the subject, is in fact itself directed against such a metaphysics.
Challenging prevailing views of the development of modern philosophy, Carr proposes a reinterpretation of the transcendental tradition and counters Heidegger’s influential readings of Kant and Husserl. He defends their subtle and complex transcendental investigations of the self and the life of subjectivity. In Carr’s interpretation, far from joining the project of metaphysical foundationalism, transcendental philosophy offers epistemological critique and phenomenological description. Its aim is not metaphysical conclusions but rather an appreciation for the rich and sometimes contradictory character of experience. The transcendental approach to the self is skillfully summed up by Husserl as “the paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.”

Proposing striking new readings of Kant and Husserl and reviving a sound awareness of the transcendental tradition, Carr’s distinctive historical and systematic position will interest a wide range of readers and provoke discussion among philosophers of metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy.

Review

David Carr’s Paradox of Subjectivity is a brilliant and challenging defense of the legitimacy and distinctiveness of the transcendental tradition in modern philosophy. This is a splendid book, to be enjoyed by anyone interested in Kant, or in the philosophical problems that gripped him.

The Philosophical Review

“…a timely and refreshing defense of the tradition of transcendental philosophy in Kant and Husserl against Heidegger’s influential attack….The erudition and clarity of this fine study make it accessible to both undergraduate and graduate audiences. This is a welcome addition to all collections supporting a major in philosophy.”–Choice“

A brilliant and challenging defense of the legitimacy and distinctiveness of the transcendental tradition in modern philosophy takes the world as given and explores it factually…this is a splendid book, to be enjoyed by anyone interested in Kant, or in the philosophical problems that gripped him.”–The Philosophical Review

The ontological status of the transcendental self : a comparative study of Kant and Śaṅkara

Date 1996
Authors Sewnath, Ramon R.

Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Philosophy; no. 3335

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/b5b60552-ca4b-43eb-878c-42e6aa274c1e

Abstract

The focus of this dissertation is on a comparative study of the notion of the transcendental self or, briefly, the Self as developed by Kant and Sarikara. The main purpose is, however, not simply to compare the views of Kant and Sarikara, but rather to use the rich sources of both the West and the East–that is, in this case the insights of both Kant and Sarikara–to rethink and to elucidate the question of the Self. More specifically, the main problem that is addressed in this dissertation is: what is the ontological status of the Self? Drawing on the insights of both Kant and Sarikara, an attempt is made to elucidate, as well as to provide a possible answer to this question. At the very outset of their projects both Kant and Sarikara have started out with basically different questions and assumptions, and as a result divergent views of the Self have emerged. This is, however, not to say that there are no similarities in their viewpoints. Both claim, for example, that the Self is not an object of empirical consciousness. And, furthermore, that the Self is original pure consciousness. These similarities, even though superficial and functional in nature, nevertheless point to some common concerns, which in turn may be useful in extending our understanding of the Self. But what is perhaps most important is that the discussion of the views of both thinkers in the comparative context shows that the ontological significance attached to the Self varies with the epistemological assumptions with which we operate. This makes it indeed difficult, but certainly not impossible to grasp the ontological status of the Self. A possible way of understanding the ontological status of the Self is to distinguish between the reflexive state of consciousness and original consciousness. While reflexive consciousness is vital for our existence, it keeps us in a perpetual state of becoming. It is suggested that original consciousness as my very mode of being cannot become an object of reflection. It is an experienced reality and not a concept. Thus it is possible to attain genuine self-knowledge when we reach beyond the boundaries of the reflexive state of consciousness.

The Transcendental Self.

Greenham, D. (2012).

In: Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137265203_5

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137265203_5

‘Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Project of Transcendental Self-Knowledge’,

Moran, Dermot,

in Ursula Renz (ed.), Self-Knowledge: A History, OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS (New York, 2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 16 Feb. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190226411.003.0016, accessed 3 Nov. 2023.

https://academic.oup.com/book/4734/chapter-abstract/146976192?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Abstract

This chapter explores Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of self-knowledge, including his conceptions of subjectivity, sense constitution, and the divide between natural and transcendental self-experience. Husserl regards self-knowledge as the key to all knowledge, and he sees his project as a radicalization of Descartes’ exploration of the first person. All objectivity is the achievement of constituting subjectivity, and so coming to know this subjectivity is of the greatest importance to overcome naturalistic objectivism. Self-knowledge, moreover, for Husserl, involves a commitment to be an autonomous responsible subject living a life of clarified rational motives. This chapter outlines Husserl’s rich conception of the self and its self-knowledge, including its temporal and habitual character, the nature of the splitting of the ego in natural and transcendental reflection, and the relation of I to not-I.

“The Transcendental Self in Husserl’s Phenomenology: Some Suggested Revisions.”

OBERLANDER, GEORGE E.

Research in Phenomenology 3 (1973): 45–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24654257.

The transcendental self

The search for meaning and value

Issue 89, 9th June 2020

John Cottingham

| Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Roehampton, London, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford University

https://iai.tv/articles/the-transcendental-self-auid-1560

Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self

SEP

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mind/

Self to Self: Selected Essays, Second Edition

J. David Velleman

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/rv042w25m

AN INTRODUCTION TO ‘SELF AND ĀTMAN’

Lunneihoi Thangeo

An Introduction to ‘Self and Ātman’

AN INTRODUCTION TO ‘SELF AND ĀTMAN’

Lunneihoi Thangeo

Lunneihoi Thangeo is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at North-Eastern Hill University, India. She also teaches introductory courses in philosophy to undergraduates at St. Anthony’s College as a part-time lecturer. Her main interests are metaphysics and epistemology.

Ātman can be variously understood as the inner being, the eternally existing, the conscious, and the witness. It has also been called the true self that remains constant amidst all bodily changes. In Indian philosophy, there is a distinction between the lower self and the higher self. The consciousness of the lower self is finite, while the consciousness of the higher self is infinite. The lower self is trapped in the cycle of rebirths and re-deaths due to the law of karma, while the higher self is free. However, the lower self can get liberation from the karmic cycle using right knowledge and right action. Depending on the school of Indian philosophy, at liberation, the lower self can attain any of these three states – it realizes that it had always been the higher self, it becomes identical to the higher self, or it attains communion with the higher self.

The first sense of liberation (where the lower self realizes that it had always been the higher self) is the theme of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna during the Kurukshetra War. The Kurukshetra War was a struggle for power between two groups of cousins. These were the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Arjuna belonged to the Pandava army and Krishna was his charioteer during the war. When they reached the battlefield, Arjuna’s determination to fight was weakened after recognizing familiar faces in the opposing army. Besides his cousins, he recognized his uncles and former teachers whom he did not want to harm. When Krishna saw this hesitancy, he began to instruct Arjuna on the true nature of the self. The Bhagavad Gita mentions Krishna as saying,

“The one who thinks that Ātman is a slayer, and the one who thinks that Ātman is slain, both are ignorant, because Ātman neither slays nor is slain… It is unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval. The Ātman is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” (2.19-20)

Purusha

The nature of the self that emerges in the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna is that of pure consciousness. Such a theory of self is taught by the Sāṅkhya and Yoga schools of Indian philosophy (henceforth, Sāṅkhya-Yoga). To say that the self is pure consciousness means that consciousness is the essence of the self. In other words, it means that the self is consciousness itself. This is different from saying that the self possesses consciousness. For the self to possess consciousness, we would have to think of the self as a substance. But Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophers deny that the self is a substance.

To clarify the point of how the self is not a substance, let us consider the meaning of a substance. By ‘substance’, we mean the basic constituent of reality. A substance is called the substratum of qualities. As a substratum, the existence of a substance is supposed to be prior to and separate from the qualities that are found in it. For instance, take the conception of a substance found in another Indian school of philosophy called the Vaiśeṣika. According to the Vaiśeṣikas, a total of nine substances make our reality. These are earth, air, water, fire, ether, space, time, soul, and mind. Each substance possesses unique qualities that differentiate it from others. Earth has the unique quality of smell, air has touch, water has taste, fire has color, ether has sound, space has extension and co-existence, time has duration and changes, the soul has consciousness and mind has perception. As per Vaiśeṣika philosophy, the soul substance represents the true nature of the self. The soul substance is not always conscious. The quality of consciousness is activated only when it comes into contact with the mind substance, which in turn has to be in contact with the physical substances. This means that in Vaiśeṣikas philosophy, we can separate the self from consciousness. But we cannot do the same in Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophy. In Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophy, the self is always conscious. This eternally conscious self is called purusha.

In Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophy, there is no fundamental difference between the higher self and the lower self. The higher self is the original state of purusha, while the lower self is the ignorant state of the same purusha. Purusha has always existed. It cannot be killed. Purusha is Ātman. This is why Krishna could say to Arjuna,

“There was never a time when I, you, or these kings did not exist; nor shall we ever cease to exist in the future.” (2.12)

Krishna was talking about purusha and not the physical body. The physical body is a part of matter. In its original state, purusha is infinite and independent of matter. In its ignorant state, purusha is limited and dependent on matter. Matter is co-eternal with purusha. The name given to this primordial  matter is prakrti.

Prakrti

Prakrti is uncaused and independent. While purusha is the conscious self, prakrti is the unconscious matter. Prakrti is a unity of three essential constituents. These are sattva guṇa, rajas guṇa, and tamas guṇa. Each of them has a distinct character. Sattva guṇahas the nature of illumination and pleasure. Rajas guṇa has the nature of activity and pain. Tamas guṇa has the nature of ignorance  and indifference.

The creation of the universe cannot take place without prakrti. But prakrti alone cannot begin producing. Prakrti needs purusha to commence the creation process. We can understand the exact roles played by each using Aristotle’s classification of causes. Aristotle had divided all causes into formal, material, efficient, and final. The formal cause is that according to which the effect is to be formed or shaped. For instance, when an architect plans for a bamboo house, the blueprint of the bamboo house is the formal cause. The material cause is that out of which the effect will be formed. In the example of the bamboo house, the material cause is bamboo. The efficient cause is the force that will transform matter according to the plan. The energy of the builders will be the force that converts the bamboo sticks into the planned bamboo house. Lastly, the final cause is the driving reason behind the other causes. If the bamboo house was built for commercial purposes, then the final cause of the house is profit-making.

We can now put the roles of Purusha and Prakriti in terms of these four causes. Prakrtiperforms the three roles of being the formal, material, and efficient cause. Prakrti is the formal cause because the nature of guṇas determines the form of everything that comes into existence. The combination of the three guṇas is present in all things in different proportions. Prakrti is the material cause of the universe because there is no other matter besides it. Prakrti is also the efficient cause because it already possesses the energy required for creation in the form of rajas guṇa. The final cause is purusha. Purusha is the witness to the creation process. Creation takes place for the self-realization of purusha.

In Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophy, prakrti is not just the cause of the sense and motor organs, but also the intellect, mind, and ego. Thus, in human beings, the ability to sense pain and pleasure, to be at rest or perform an activity, and to gain knowledge or remain ignorant are the potentials of the material body and not the self.

Bondage and Liberation

Even though prakrti possesses the potential for sensations and mental formations, these cannot be experienced by prakrti. Prakrti is devoid of all awareness. Even the mind and ego  seem to be aware only because they reflect the consciousness of purusha. The mind and ego  can reflect the consciousness of purusha because they are dominated by sattva guṇa, the guṇa of illumination. This can be illustrated in the following way. Of all the natural surfaces, the water surface possesses the property of reflection. So, when we want to see the reflected image of the bright moon at night, we approach a water surface. Although the water surface has this extra reflective property compared to say, a mound of earth, it does not know about it. The water surface remains as unconscious as the mound of earth. This is the same thing that happens with the mind and ego. They are like the water surface, capable of reflection, but they are not aware that they are reflecting. The mind and ego remain as unconscious as the sense and motor organs.

If the mind and ego remain unconscious, then what is it that says, ‘I have a mind’ or ‘This is my body’ or ‘I am feeling pleasure’? According to Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophers, this is purusha. We can explain this by taking the example of the moon again. The moon seems encaged by the boundaries of the water body which reflects it. In the same way, purusha seems confined by the mind and ego that reflects it.

But purusha does not possess guṇa so it cannot have sensations and mental formations. However, since purusha is awareness, what happens here is that it becomes aware of the sensations and mental formations taking place in prakrti. So, purusha experiences pain and pleasure only in association with prakrti. In other words, purusha has a sense of having a finite body and limited perception only in association with prakrti.

During this association, purusha ignores its true nature by paying attention to its reflection in prakrti. It begins to appropriate the physical and psychical changes occurring in prakrti as its own. This mistaken identity can trap purusha for a long time. Since matter goes through composition and decomposition, purusha also seems to pass through recurring cycles of births and deaths according to the law of karma.

Purusha can get liberated from this endless cycle by realizing that it is eternally independent of prakrti. There was never an actual association between them. Matter cannot imprison consciousness. Rather, consciousness seems to be imprisoned only by a misconception.

Meditative  practices can also facilitate the removal of misconception. The purpose of meditation is to wean the consciousness away from the various sensations in the body and the ever-changing thoughts in the mind. At first, a single object is chosen as the locus of concentration. When consciousness gets distracted, it is brought back to this object. The ultimate aim, however, is to transcend  even this locus of concentration and become free of all thoughts. Only then will purusha become truly liberated.

There are two kinds of liberation – jῑvanmukti and videhamukti. In jῑvanmukti, the self is enlightened, but it has not yet discarded the body. However, it is no longer moved by pain or pleasure and the fear of death is removed. In jῑvanmukti, the discriminatory knowledge of the self and the not-self is achieved. In videhamukti, the self transcends this discriminatory  knowledge and returns to its original state of pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is devoid of intellectual content, change, and activity. Videhamukti is the event of the release of the enlightened self from the body at death.

Even though videhamukti is the final liberation, it cannot be achieved withoutjῑvanmukti. A jῑvanmukta continues to perform actions but only out of a sense of obligation. When actions are performed without any self-interest, then no new karmaresidues are collected. For this reason, a jῑvanmukta is also a karma-yogi.

Karma-yogi

After talking about the true nature of the self, Krishna then instructs Arjuna to follow the path of karma-yoga. Karma-yoga is the practice of doing things without the expectation of results. A person who takes this path is called a karma-yogi.

“A Karma-yogi whose mind is pure, whose mind and senses are under control, and who sees the same Self in all beings, is not bound (by Karma) though engaged in work.” (5.07)

When the true nature of the self is known, then struggling ends. No action can enrich or take away anything from the self. The true self, purusha, is never-changing, does not have any requirements, and does not aspire to become anything else. A karma-yogi is no longer enticed by praise, material possessions, or heavenly bliss. A karma-yogi is also not driven by negative emotions such as hatred, jealousy, or vengeance. The actions of a karma-yogi are passionless. The only motivation for action is to meet the demands of the various responsibilities that one is given in life. These responsibilities could be that of a parent, a student, a laborer, or a warrior as in the case of Arjuna.

Reading Questions

What do you understand by Ātman?

Illustrate how purusha is the true self and ego is the false self.

Explain how purusha gets associated with prakrti.

Can prakrti ever become conscious?

References

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“Self and Atman.”

Levin, Noah, ed.

In SOUTH AND EAST ASIAN PHILOSOPHY READER, AN OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE, 105–15. NGE Far Press, 2019.

https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Philosophy/Book%3A_South_and_East_Asian_Philosophy_Reader_(Levin_et_al.)

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Roland Breeur (2001)

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Click to access BergsonSelf.pdf

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John Cottingham

Chapter 10 in The Moral Life
Essays in Honour of John Cottingham
Edited by
Nafsika Athanassoulis
Keele University, UK
and
Samantha Vice
Rhodes University, South Africa

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Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Self-Transcendent States: Perceived Body Boundaries and Spatial Frames of Reference

Adam W. Hanley1,2, Michael Dambrun3, Eric L. Garland1,2
1=Center on Mindfulness and Integrative Health Intervention Development (C-MIIND), University of Utah

2=College of Social Work, University of Utah
3=Laboratory of Social and Cognitive Psychology, Université Clermont Auvergne

Mindfulness (N Y). 2020 May ; 11(5): 1194–1203. doi:10.1007/s12671-020-01330-9.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7968136/

Formal and Transcendental Logic

By Edmund Husserl

Transcendental Subjectivity and the Human Being

Hanne Jacobs

Penultimate version of article forthcoming in: Phenomenology and The Transcendental, edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, Timo Miettinen, Routledge, forthcoming.

The Empirical and Transcendental Ego.

Natanson, M. (1962).

In: Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9278-1_4

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-9278-1_4

From transcendental egology to orientation theory: Toward a mereological foundation for the different senses of the “self” in conscious experience

Joan González Guardiola^*

Department of Philosophy and Social Work, University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), Palma, Spain

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1069448/full

Nagarjuna and the Art of Negation: Discerning Subjectivity, Emptiness …

By Mathew Varghese

“The Question of the Subject: Heidegger and the Transcendental Tradition.”

Carr, David.

Human Studies 17, no. 4 (1994): 403–18.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20011059

Transcendental Philosophy and Intersubjectivity: Mutual Recognition as a Condition for the Possibility of Self-Consciousness in Sections 1–3 of Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right

Jacob McNulty

First published: 14 February 2016

https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12131

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejop.12131

Abstract

In the opening sections of his Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte argues that mutual recognition is a condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. However, the argument turns on the apparently unconvincing claim that, in the context of transcendental philosophy, conceptions of the subject as an isolated individual give rise to a vicious circle the resolution of which requires the introduction of a second rational being to ‘summon’ the first. In this essay, my aim is to present a revised account of the opening arguments on which they are more convincing. In particular, I argue that the problem of a circle is genuine and may be seen to result from a relation of mutual dependence between agency and cognition which ensures that for an exercise of either capacity to take place, an exercise of the other would have already had to have taken place with the result that neither can occur. Moreover, the solution is successful. The summons (the claim of the other) prevents us from being driven around the circle once more because it is a ‘synthesis’ that reconciles the constraint to which I am subject as a cognizer of independently given objects and my freedom as a self-determining subject.

Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness

By Pierre Keller

The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence

Cosimo Urgesi
Salvatore M. Aglioti
Miran Skrap
Franco Fabbro

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.026

https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0896-6273(10)00052-8

“What Is the Western Concept of the Self? On Forgetting David Hume.”

Murray, D. W.

Ethos 21, no. 1 (1993): 3–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/640288.

Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence …

By Günter Zöller

Phenomenology and the Transcendental

edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, Timo Miettinen

Problems of Other Minds: Solutions and Dissolutions in Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Jack Reynolds

First published: 07 April 2010

Volume5, Issue4

April 2010

Pages 326-335

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00293.x

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00293.x

Abstract

While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How do we know that others exist? Can we justifiably claim to know that they do?); (2) an ontological dimension that incorporates issues having to do with personal identity (What is the structure of our world such that inter-subjectivity is possible? What are the fundamental aspects of our relations to others? How do they impact upon our self-identity?); and (3) A conceptual dimension in that it depends on one’s answer to the question what is a mind (How does the mind – or the concept of ‘mind’– relate to the brain, the body and the world?). While these three issues are co-imbricated, I will claim that analytic engagements with the problem of other minds focus on (1), whereas continental philosophers focus far more on (2). In addition, this article will also point to various other downstream consequences of this, including the preoccupation with embodiment and forms of expressivism that feature heavily in various forms of continental philosophy, and which generally aim to ground our relations with others in a pre-reflective manner of inhabiting the world that is said to be the condition of reflection and knowledge.

Mind, Meaning and World

A Transcendental Perspective

Authors: Ramesh Chandra Pradhan

DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7228-5
Publisher Springer Singapore
Hardcover ISBN 978-981-13-7227-8
Published: 08 May 2019

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-7228-5

First book to defend the transcendental theory of consciousness in recent times
Brings Vedanta and Buddhism into the mainstream of philosophy of mind to counter naturalism
Brings the continental and analytic thinkers along with the thinkers from the East on one platform

The present book intends to approach the problem of mind, meaning and consciousness from a non-naturalist or transcendental point of view. The naturalization of consciousness has reached a dead-end. There can be no proper solution to the problem of mind within the naturalist framework. This work intends to reverse this trend and bring back the long neglected transcendental theory laid down by Kant and Husserl in the West and Vedanta and Buddhism in India. The novelty of this approach lies in how we can make an autonomous space for mind and meaning without denying its connection with the world. The transcendental theory does not disown the embodied nature of consciousness, but goes beyond the body in search of higher meanings and values. The scope of this work extends from mind and consciousness to the world and brings the world into the space of mind and meaning with a hope to enchant the world. The world needs to be retrieved from the stranglehold of scientism and naturalism. This book will dispel the illusion about naturalism which has gripped the minds of our generation. The researchers interested in the philosophy of mind and consciousness can benefit from this work.

Ramesh Chandra Pradhan was Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad during 1998–2015. He taught at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, and Karnatak University, Dharwad, before joining the University of Hyderabad in 1987. He was a Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellow at the University of Oxford during 1990–1991. He has specialized in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. He has authored a number of books on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, philosophy of language and metaphysics. He has contributed many papers to philosophy journals. Professor Pradhan is at present National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.

HUSSERL’S INTERSUBJECTIVE TRANSFORMATION OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Dan Zahavi
University of Copenhagen

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27/7, 1996, 228-245

DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1996.11007165

“Hegel and Transcendental Philosophy.”

Williams, Robert R.

The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 11 (1985): 595–606. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026413.

Transcendence and the Transcendental in Husserl’s Phenomenology

Caputo, John D

Philosophy Today; Celina, Ohio Vol. 23, Iss. 3, (Fall 1979): 205.

Transcendental Consciousness
A Fourth State of Consciousness Beyond Sleep, Dreaming, and Waking

Chapter

By Charles N. Alexander, Robert W. Cranson, Robert W. Boyer, David W. Orme-Johnson
Book Sleep and Dreams
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 1987
Imprint Routledge
Pages 35
eBook ISBN 9781315311579

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315311579-10/transcendental-consciousness-charles-alexander-robert-cranson-robert-boyer-david-orme-johnson

ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces a fourth major state of consciousness–transcendental consciousness–to distinguish it from the states of deep sleep, dreaming, including lucid dreaming, and waking, and to suggest its role in a model of human development to higher states of consciousness. The experience of the fourth state of consciousness has been described and its physiological correlates have been predicted by the Vedic psychology of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. This comprehensive psychological theory and technology of human development is based on the ancient classical science of the Veda which emphasizes the subjective approach to gaining knowledge, as well as the objective approach of modern science. Psychophysiological research indicates that transcendental consciousness can be distinguished from deep sleep on a number of dimensions. The dreaming state is subjectively characterized by illusory perception of the self and the environment and their interaction. Typically, the dreamer’s awareness is completely identified with a dream self as it appears in the dream, or with other dream content.

In defence of the transcendent

Les Lancaster

Transpersonal Psychology Review, 2002, 6 (1), 42-51

“Transcendental Idealism in Wittgenstein, and Theories of Meaning.”

Moore, A. W.

The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-)35, no. 139 (1985): 134–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/2219340.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2219340

The Transcendental Circle

Jeff Malpas

Click to access The-Transcendental-Circle.pdf

The Embodied and Transcendental Self

Toward a Synthesis and a Way of Knowing

Ralph D. Ellis

Philosophy in the Contemporary World

Realism, Constructionism, and the Self

Volume 5, Issue 2/3, Summer/Fall 1998 Pages 67-83

https://doi.org/10.5840/pcw199852/316

https://www.pdcnet.org/pcw/content/pcw_1998_0005_0002_0067_0083

The ‘embodied self’ is the purposeful dimension of any organism capable of acting toward a unified motivation to maintain a self-organizing structure by appropriating, replacing, and reproducing material components to serve as substrata. We reflect on the ‘self’ in this sense when we direct attention away from the objects of experience and toward the way our bodies motivate our experiences in terms of emotional purposes of the organism, by looking, searching, shifting the focus of attention, etc.—actions rather than reactions of our bodies and nervous systems. The ‘transcendental self,’ by contrast, cannot be identified with any particular embodied state of consciousness, because it is that which unifies all the particular stages and gives them direction. It is argued here that affect and motivation are the keys to understanding and unifying the transcendental and embodied selves, because both reflect the organism’s self-organizing tendency; and that we can know ourselves by understanding the way affect and motivation shape the pattern and direction of our stream of consciousness.

Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

By Christopher Janaway

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation

edited by Peter Sullivan, Michael Potter

Making sense

Husserl’s phenomenology as transcendental idealism

By Dermot Moran
Book From Kant to Davidson
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2002
Imprint Routledge
Pages 27
eBook ISBN 9780203219577

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203219577-4/making-sense-dermot-moran

Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: Unity, Representation and Apperception

By Lawrence J. Kaye

Is Svasavitti Transcendental? A Tentative Reconstruction Following Śntarakita

Dan Arnold

Asian Philosophy, 15:1, 77-111, DOI: 10.1080/0955236052000341050

“Review of R. C. Pradhan (RCP)’s Mind, Meaning and World: A Transcendental Perspective, Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd., 2019”.

Nath, R.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

AI & Soc (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01556-2

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-022-01556-2

Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition

By Michael Steven Green

“Kant, Transcendental Arguments and the Problem of Deduction.”

Bübner, Rüdiger, and Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe.

The Review of Metaphysics 28, no. 3 (1975): 453–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20126664.

Consciousness and Veda: Research into Direct Experience of the Self-Interacting Dynamics of Transcendental Consciousness through Maharishi Technologies of Consciousness, Including Vedic Sound

Runkle, Susan J

Maharishi University of Management

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2022. 29068046.

From a Transcendental-semiotic Point of View

By Karl-Otto Apel

Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Theory of Perception

Sebastian Gardner

Click to access S_Gardner_Merleau-Ponty.pdf

Kant, Neo-Kantians, and Transcendental Subjectivity

Charlotte Baumann

DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12162

European Journal of Philosophy 25:3 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 595–616

Click to access BAUKNA-2.pdf

“Schelling’s Concept of Self-Consciousness in His System of Transcendental Idealism (1800).”

Lang, Stefan.

Archiv Für Begriffsgeschichte 55 (2013): 165–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24361936.

Self and World

By Quassim Cassam

Transcendental Apperception: Consciousness or Self-Consciousness? Comments on Chapter 9 of Patricia Kitcher’s Kant’s Thinker

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2014

Ralf Busse

Kantian Review Volume 19 Issue 1

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/kantian-review/article/abs/transcendental-apperception-consciousness-or-selfconsciousness-comments-on-chapter-9-of-patricia-kitchers-kants-thinker/3CB41E47928F75805487C87278F6F79E

Contemporary Hegelian Scholarship: On Robert Stern’s Holistic Reading of Hegel

Paniel Reyes Cárdenas

Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, Puebla panielosberto.reyes@upaep.mx

Click to access n50a6.pdf

Kant on Intuition

Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism

Edited By Stephen R. Palmquist

ISBN 9780367732523

334 Pages

Published December 18, 2020 by Routledge

https://www.routledge.com/Kant-on-Intuition-Western-and-Asian-Perspectives-on-Transcendental-Idealism/Palmquist/p/book/9780367732523

Kant on Intuition: Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism consists of 20 chapters, many of which feature engagements between Kant and various Asian philosophers. Key themes include the nature of human intuition (not only as theoretical—pure, sensible, and possibly intellectual—but also as relevant to Kant’s practical philosophy, aesthetics, the sublime, and even mysticism), the status of Kant’s idealism/realism, and Kant’s notion of an object. Roughly half of the chapters take a stance on the recent conceptualism/non-conceptualism debate. The chapters are organized into four parts, each with five chapters. Part I explores themes relating primarily to the early sections of Kant’s first Critique: three chapters focus mainly on Kant’s theory of the “forms of intuition” and/or “formal intuition”, especially as illustrated by geometry, while two examine the broader role of intuition in transcendental idealism. Part II continues to examine themes from the Aesthetic but shifts the main focus to the Transcendental Analytic, where the key question challenging interpreters is to determine whether intuition (via sensibility) is ever capable of operating independently from conception (via understanding); each contributor offers a defense of either the conceptualist or the non-conceptualist readings of Kant’s text. Part III includes three chapters that explore the relevance of intuition to Kant’s theory of the sublime, followed by two that examine challenges that Asian philosophers have raised against Kant’s theory of intuition, particularly as it relates to our experience of the supersensible. Finally, Part IV concludes the book with five chapters that explore a range of resonances between Kant and various Asian philosophers and philosophical ideas.

“The Role of Apperception in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.”

Castañeda, Hector-Neri.

Noûs 24, no. 1 (1990): 147–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/2215618.

Transcendental Philosophy As Capacities-First Philosophy

Karl Schafer

First published: 17 November 2020

Volume103, Issue3

November 2021

Pages 661-686

https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12740

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/phpr.12740

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism

Dermot Moran

Cont Philos Rev
DOI 10.1007/s11007-008-9088-3

Click to access Husserls-transcendental-philosophy-and-the-critique-of-naturalism.pdf

Chapter 3
Transcendental Apperception and Consciousness in Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics

Dennis Schulting

workshop Kant as Lecturer/ Philosopher: Connections between his Lectures and Philosophy, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Uni- versität in Munich on 3–4 May 2013.

Click to access SCHTAA-16.pdf

Transcendental Unity of Apperception and Non-reflective Consciousness of Self

Sorin Baiasu

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/76051/1/54.pdf.pdf#page=29

System of Transcendental Philosophy

Friedrich Schelling (1800)

Click to access schelling_transc_philos.pdf

Polarity processing

Self/No-Self, the Transcendent Function, and wholeness

By Deon van Zyl

Chapter

Book Self and No-Self

Edition 1st Edition First Published 2009

Imprint Routledge Pages 12 eBook ISBN 9781315787558

Schopenhauer and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

PETRI RÄSÄNEN

ACADEMIC DISSERTATION
To be presented, with the permission of
the Faculty of Information Sciences of the University of Tampere, for public discussion in the Paavo Koli Auditorium of the University, Kanslerinrinne 1, Tampere, on October 15th, 2005, at 12 o’clock.

https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/67524/951-44-6421-4.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

HEGEL’S IDEALISM

ROBERT STERN

Click to access WRRO_43842.pdf

HEIDEGGER’S TRANSCENDENTALISM

DANIEL DAHLSTROM

Boston University

Click to access d-heidegger-transcendentalism.pdf

Reconstruction and Reduction: Natorp and Husserl on Method and the Question of Subjectivity1

Sebastian Luft

Marquette University

META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY VOL. VIII, NO. 2 / DECEMBER 2016: 326-370, ISSN 2067-3655

Click to access 04-luft-meta-luft-final.pdf

Was Merleau-Ponty a ‘transcendental’ phenomenologist?

Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception

Kourosh Christian Alizadeh

DISSERTATION DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology
Nature, Spirit, and Life

Andrea Staiti, Boston College, Massachusetts

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Online publication date: November 2014
Print publication year: 2014
Online ISBN: 9781107588875
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107588875

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/husserls-transcendental-phenomenology/2B25ED1C3CE802A1DD74D9F064078AD0#fndtn-information

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl’s phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl’s writings on the natural and human sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl’s thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally.

Transcendental Inquiry

Its History, Methods and Critiques

Editors Halla Kim, Steven Hoeltzel
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40715-9
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan Cham

Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-40714-2
Published: 12 January 2017

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-40715-9

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism as Empirical Realism

By Lewis Edward Clarke

Submitted for the degree of PhD at the University of East Anglia, Department of Philosophy

August 2016

Click to access Thesis_Manuscript_%28Final_Submission%29.pdf

“Toward a Transcendental Pragmatic Reconciliation of Analytic and Continental Philosophy”

Jerold J. Abrams

In: Bergman, M., Paavola, S., Pietarinen, A.-V., & Rydenfelt, H. (Eds.) (2010). Ideas in Action: Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference(pp. 62–73). Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 1. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network.

Click to access Abrams.pdf

Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology

Sebastian Luft
Marquette University, sebastian.luft@marquette.edu

(2018). Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications. 772.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/phil_fac/772

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1776&context=phil_fac

The Great Phenomenological Schism:

Reactions to Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism

The North American Society for Early Phenomenology

June 3-6th, 2015
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City

Click to access PROGRAMA-THE-GREAT-PHENOMENOLOGICA-SCHISM.pdf

Sartre’s Critique of Husserl

Jonathan Webber

Author’s post-print. Final version to appear in

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

2019

Click to access SartresCritiqueOfHusserl.pdf

Sartre’s Transcendental Phenomenology

Jonathan Webber

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology

edited by Dan Zahavi Oxford University Press, 2018

Click to access SartresTranscendentalPhenomenology.pdf

2 Transcendence and Transcendental Strategy

Chapter 2

https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/1965/03chapter2.pdf;jsessionid=39085AE78699BFA8C62A208B9571A85D?sequence=3

“Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism,”

Smith, Joel, and Peter M. Sullivan. 2011.

August.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608553.001.0001.

https://oa.mg/work/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608553.001.0001

Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

Henry Somers-Hall
First published: 07 March 2019

https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12313

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjp.12313

Transcendental Idealism at the Limit: On A. W. Moore’s Criticism of Kant. Philosophical Topics

Gardner, S; (2016)

Click to access 79496812.pdf

The Transcendental Turn

Introduction

Chapter of the book

Sebastian Gardner

Click to access Gardner_Introduction.book.chapter.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286466555_The_Transcendental_Turn

THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSION OF PHENOMENOLOGY

SEBASTIAN LUFT

Diálogos, 91 (2008) 1 pp. 7-18

Click to access 03-The-Transcendental-Dimension-Sebastian-Luft-n.pdf

From Kant to Post-Kantian Idealism: German Idealism: Sebastian Gardner

Sebastian Gardner
First published: 07 January 2003

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8349.00096

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8349.00096

From Kant to Post-Kantian Idealism: German Idealism: Paul Franks

Paul Franks
First published: 07 January 2003

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8349.00097

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8349.00097

Transcendental Arguments About Other Minds and Intersubjectivity

Matheson Russell, Jack Reynolds

First published: 04 May 2011

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00394.x

Abstract

This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will introduce some of the important contributions of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karl-Otto Apel, all of whom use transcendental reasoning as a key part of their analyses of intersubjectivity, and we also consider the work of Peter Strawson who does likewise in the analytic tradition.

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The Persistent Problems of Philosophy

An Introduction to Metaphysics through the study of Modern Systems

Mary W Calkins

1919

4th edition

Author: Mayank Chaturvedi

You can contact me using this email mchatur at the rate of AOL.COM. My professional profile is on Linkedin.com. View all posts by Mayank Chaturvedi

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