Transcendental Inquiry Research Articles

Gadamer and Aristotle. Problems of a Hermeneutic Appropriation

ABSTRACT When Gadamer elaborates his conception of philosophical hermeneutics as a transcendental inquiry, he appeals to Aristotle’s practical philosophy as a “model”, which can elucidate his own conceptualization of understanding as intrinsically bound to the specific circumstances of every interpretation. The explicit formulation of the analogy between Aristotelian ethics and philosophical hermeneutics provides a framework that clarifies Gadamer’s principal intention; it also reveals some of the crucial tensions inherent in the Aristotelian conception of practical philosophy and its relation to praxis and phronêsis. In the 1970s, however, Gadamer suggests a practical transformation of hermeneutics, claiming for it the role of an “heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy”. Against Gadamer’s late “turn”, construed as a deviation from the initial analogy, I defend Aristotle’s practical philosophy as an exemplary model for philosophical hermeneutics, but I also maintain that the two projects pursue distinct epistemic goals.

Back to the Phenomenology of Technical Life

This essay is a response to Robert Scharff’s “Before Empirical Turns and Transcendental Inquiry: pre-philosophical Considerations”. Scharff digs beneath the empirico-transcendental debate between Ihde and Stiegler in order to critique this debate’s Cartesian presuppositions. He uses the work of Nietzsche and the early Heidegger to further his critique. There is much to like in Scharff’s rich and intricate analytic interpretation but this is also the crux of my critique. The detour into Nietzsche’s and the early Heidegger’s work is ultimately unnecessary. If Scharff looks closer, he will see that Feenberg’s revised theory of instrumentalization already accomplishes the return to technical experience and the critique of Cartesian techno scientific rationality that Scharff desires.

A Reading of Heidegger’s Reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason

This paper intends to argue over these subsequent ideas: first, that Heidegger’s employment of ‘retrieval’, ‘repetition’, or ‘thinking dialogue’ in his interpretation of Kant’s first Critique is, following Macann, quite hazardous and destructive but only on the surface. Heidegger's hermeneutical privilege to employ a specific interpretive frame in reading Kant seems to violate hermeneutics' fundamental maxim. This hermeneutic maxim is the inevitability of multiple interpretations. This can be seen in how Heidegger treated Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where he announces that he “understand him (Kant) better than he (Kant) understood himself.” At first glance, his declaration exudes a kind of intellectual arrogance. However, I will show this is not so. Secondly, I will argue, based on the question of Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s ideas in his philosophical project, that he partly appropriated Kant but in a violent manner. As evident in his interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger goes beyond Kant and forces the latter to speak through his text on the issues Heidegger thought to be in Kant. This raises the question of whether Heidegger properly situated and appropriated Kant in his text or not.
 References
 
 Dahlstrom, Daniel. “The Critique of Pure Reason and Continental Philosophy.” In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
 Frede, Dorothea. “The question of being Heidegger’s project.” In Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
 Grene, Marjorie. Martin Heidegger. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1957.
 Guignon, Charles B. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
 Heidegger, Martin. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.
 Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edition. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.
 Heidegger, Martin. Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982.
 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Q. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
 Kenny, Anthony. “The Philosopher’s History and the History of Philosophy.” In Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy. Edited by Tom Sorell and G.A.J. Rogers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
 Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998.
 Macann, Christopher. “Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation.” In Critical Heidegger. Edited by Christopher Macann. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
 Moreiras, Alberto. “Heidegger, Kant, and the Problem of Transcendence.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy vol. xxiv, no. 1 (1986): 81-93.
 Nelson, Eric S. “Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy.” In Transcendental Inquiry. Edited by Halla Kim & Steven Hoeltzel. MacMillan: Palgrave, 2016.
 Sherover, Charles. Heidegger, Kant and Time. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
 Stoljar, Daniel. Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
 Taft, Richard. “Translator’s Introduction to the 4th Edition.” In Martin Heidegger. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th edition enlarged. Translated by Richard Taft Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.
 Weatherston, Martin. Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination and Temporality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Transcendental Inquiry and the Belief in Body: Comments on Rocknak's Imagined Causes

Transcendental Inquiry and the Belief in Body: Comments on Rocknak's Imagined Causes

Kantian Schemata: A Critique Consistent with the Critique

AbstractKant posits the schema as a hybrid bridging the generality of pure concepts and the particularity of sensible intuitions. However, I argue that countenancing such schemata leads to a third‐man regress. Siding with those who think that the mid‐way posit of the Critique of Pure Reason's schematism section is untenable, my diagnosis is that Kant's transcendental inquiry goes awry because it attempts to analyse a form/matter union that is primitive. I therefore sketch a nonrepresentational stance aimed at respecting this primitivity.

Toward a transcendental account of creativity. Kant and Merleau-Ponty on the creative power of judgment and creativity as institution

Several works published in the last decades defend the claim that the concept of creativity should be demystified. With the aim of showing that creativity is not an obscure power owned by only few individuals and free from constraints, authors working at the intersection field between philosophy and cognitive science have notably focused on the structure and evolution of cognitive mechanisms underlying our creative capacities. While taking up the suggestion that we should try not to mystify creativity, this article argues that what is required for such demystification is primarily a transcendental and phenomenological inquiry. Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are here discussed in order to develop such a transcendental inquiry into creativity. Both Kant and Merleau-Ponty bring to the fore the conditions of possibility for creative acts, and highlight fundamental role of creativity itself in the formation of meaningfulness. The keystone of both philosophers’ inquiries is the emphasis on the interdependence between creativity and rules. Yet, due to the different approaches to the transcendental, Kant’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts do not fully converge, but should rather be considered as complementary.

Keeping It Implicit: A Defense of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge

ABSTRACT:This paper defends Michel Foucault's notion of archaeology of knowledge against the influential and putatively devastating criticism by Dreyfus and Rabinow that Foucault's archaeological project is based on an incoherent conception of the rules of the discursive practices it purports to study. I argue first that Foucault's considered view of these rules as simultaneously implicit and historically efficacious corresponds to a general requirement for the normative structure of a discursive practice. Then I argue that Foucault is entitled to that view despite the charges to the contrary by Dreyfus and Rabinow. I also explain in detail how the argument by Dreyfus and Rabinow arises from a misunderstanding of Foucault's archaeological project as transcendental inquiry, while archaeology of knowledge is, in fact, a diagnostic project. The result is a novel understanding of the notion of archaeology of knowledge that enables a reassessment of Foucault's philosophical work in connection with current debates regarding the relationship between reflection and practice in the structure of thought.

Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea by Avery Goldman (review)

Reviewed by: Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea by Avery Goldman Apaar Kumar Avery Goldman. Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 249. Paper, $27.95. The general concern of Avery Goldman’s thought-provoking study is to investigate whether Kant’s epistemology rests on metaphysical claims regarding the subject and the object. More specifically, the question is: Kant presumes a “seemingly uncritical” (27) conception of experience in order to articulate the subjective conditions that make such a notion of experience possible; but does he ever justify his initial assumption? Contra Hamann and Hegel, who deny that Kant provides such a justification, Goldman claims to “unlock the presuppositions of [Kant’s] celebrated analysis of the cognitive faculties” (3) by showing that such an analysis presupposes the metaphysical idea of the subject taken as a regulative principle. In tandem with Kant interpretations that take the Critique of Judgment as completing the project of the Critique of Pure Reason, Goldman argues that the boundary between the noumena and the phenomena, which limits finite cognition to the sensible and enables the critique of illusory metaphysics, is given not in an a priori necessary way by determinate judgment, but by “reflective judgment … directed by a regulative principle” (185). According to Goldman, Kant says in §76 of the third Critique that possibility differs from actuality only in finite cognition and “implies” (50) that our finite cognition may be dependent upon a regulative idea of reason. Pursuing this implication further, Goldman finds somewhat indirect evidence in the first Critique (A683/B711, A771–72/B799–800) to suggest that the psychological idea—the hypothetical but non-contradictory concept of the self as a “simple substance that can distinguish spatial appearances from the merely temporal activity of its thinking” (171)—serves as the regulative basis for the analysis of finite cognition. It performs this task by providing the act of transcendental reflection with the distinction between spatial objects and non-spatial thought, which then allows the speculative philosopher to explicate her faculties of cognition by “orienting” herself “in relation to her varied powers” (163–64). Goldman views this regulatively employed psychological idea that emerges from the “speculative inquiry into the soul” (171) as a response to what, in his judgment, is a circular relationship between Kant’s pursuit of metaphysics and his epistemology. The circularity lies in the fact that the psychological idea, or the unified subject as opposed to the object, forms the basis for the analysis of the faculties, even though this psychological idea itself arises out of a critique of metaphysics that follows from the analysis of the faculties (174). Goldman views this circularity as representing the “overarching methodology of Kant’s transcendental inquiry” (20), and opines that Kant himself embraces rather than denies it (179). This leads Goldman to conclude that while Kant’s theoretical system does not allow for an objective justification of its own starting point (180), it can nevertheless offer a “reflective systematization of the totality of our thought” including both empirical objects and metaphysical ideas that indeterminately guide the “unified account of the faculties of finite cognition” (184). Although Goldman’s argument is undoubtedly ingenious, his construal of circularity as the “key to understanding Kant’s elusive transcendental method” (2) could be considered problematic. As Heidegger points out, Kant is certainly open to the charge of circularity—the category of possibility is supposed to demarcate the realm of experience even when it is experience that enables the derivation of this category. Goldman, however, focuses on the circular relationship between understanding and reason (121–23, 132), and makes this relationship the occasion for arguing that the hypothetical use of the psychological idea of reason “directs the analysis of the understanding” (168). The problem with this argumentative trajectory is that no such circularity may exist between reason and understanding. One could argue that, in the first Critique, Kant starts by asking about the viability of metaphysics (Axii), and subsequently resolves this question through a critique of pure reason based on a new Copernican strategy in which we must “assume...

A transcendental phenomenological study of teachers' self efficacy experiences

This phenomenological study explored the nature of the self-efficacy phenomenon as experienced by three teachers of Turkish as a Foreign Language (TFL). A transcendental phenomenological inquiry design was used to explore the meaning ascribed to self-efficacy by teachers. Data were collected through one-on-one interviews. The data were analyzed in accordance with the guidelines of Moustakas’ phenomenological approach. Seven main themes emerged from the lived experiences of teachers regarding their perceptions of the self-efficacy. The findings of the study indicated that teacher self-efficacy could also be conceptualized in an alternative framework as a socio-cultural, relational, emotional, social psychological and moral accomplishment.

Transcendental Philosophy and the Challenge of the Human Body: Merleau-Ponty and Kant

This essay discusses Merleau-Ponty's assessment of Kant's philosophy looking first at his critique of Kant's transcendental idealism in the preface to the 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, and second at his account of the duality of the concepts of nature in the 1956-57 lecture notes on Nature at the Collčge de France. In both cases, Merleau-Ponty points to the encounter with the issue of the living/lived body as the stumbling block that halts the transcendental inquiry leading to his transcendental phenomenology. Along this itinerary, countering Merleau-Ponty's reading a different interpretation of Kant is offered. The claim is made that Kant did not evade the problem of the human body but made it functional to his own transcendental inquiry. Task of this essay is to measure the distance that separates the two accounts of Kant's view of sensibility, namely, the critical account that inspires Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body leading him beyond the alleged impasse of Kant's transcendental idealism, and what the author claims to be Kant's own transcendental view of sensibility.

Therapeutic Potential of Transcendental Inquiry in the Husserlian Philosophy

The main purpose of the article is to reconstruct a therapeutic potential of phenomenology, in particular, within Edmund Husserl’s and Eugen Fink’s program of transcendental inquiry about time. However, the Project of objective claims of phenomenology, which is presented in the Logical Investigations seems to exclude all therapeutic approach. Rather, the program postulates the striving for abstract “truths in themselves,” also it ignores the surrounding world, as well as intersubjectivity, and finally leads to the solitary life of a phenomenologist. How then is the therapeutic potential of phenomenology possible? The case of questioning plays the crucial role in the context of objective science. According to Husserl, each science which does not allow to ask “the most burning questions” is naļve, and therefore it limits the therapeutic potential. While focusing on propositions, objective phenomenology excludes all questions, indeed. In contrast to such a view, transcendental phenomenology allows to ask over and over again, and by doing so, it introduces the world, as well as intersubjectivity as horizons of phenomenological inquiry. Concluding, Husserl’s collaboration with Fink presents such a communal effort into questioning about time. Therefore, “therapeutic potential” of phenomenology means precisely the methodological movement of the possibility for communal formulation of transcendental investigation.

Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages

A growing body of interpretive literature concerning the work of Michel Foucault asserts that Foucault’s critical project is best interpreted in light of various strands of philosophical phenomenology. In this article I dispute this interpretation on both textual and philosophical grounds. It is shown that a core theme of ‘the phenomenological Foucault’ having to do with transcendental inquiry cannot be sustained by a careful reading of Foucault’s texts nor by a careful interpretation of Foucault’s philosophical commitments. It is then shown that this debate in Foucault scholarship has wider ramifications for understanding ‘the critical Foucault’ and the relationship of Foucault’s projects to Kantian critical philosophy. It is argued that Foucault’s work is Kantian at its core insofar as it institutes a critical inquiry into conditions of possibility. But whereas critique for Kant was transcendental in orientation, in Foucault critique becomes historical, and is much the better for it.

Transcendental Pragmatisms

In this article, I contend that there are at least two contemporary types of Kantian transcendental pragmatism: Sami Pihlstrom's naturalistic transcendental pragmatism and Josiah Royce's absolute pragmatism. Each one of these transcendental pragmatisms represents one side of the Kantian transcendental tradition. Pihlstrom's naturalistic transcendental pragmatism represents the side of the Kantian transcendental tradition that is familiar to most philosophers, namely, the transcendental inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of human experience. Royce's absolute pragmatism represents the other, more neglected, side of the Kantian transcendental tradition, namely, the transcendental analysis of the meaningfulness of moral, aesthetic, and religious experience, especially theistic religious experience. I contend that Royce's pragmatism is more representative of the Kantian transcendental tradition than is Pihlstrom's pragmatism.

Transcendental Philosophy and Atheism

Engineers test materials by subjecting them to stress: once a beam has been broken one can specify exactly how strong it was. The same method can be used in philosophy. In the Autumn of 1798 and the Winter of 1799, Fichte’s philosophical position was submitted to extraordinary stress in the extended episode known as the Atheism Controversy, culminating in his forced dismissal from his university post at Jena. The disputed issues explicitly concerned matters of religious faith and philosophical theology, but the stress of the controversy exposed fundamental tensions in Fichte’s broader philosophical position and provoked him to formulate a novel, proto-phenomenological account of the scope and structure of transcendental investigation. Recent years have seen an explosion of new interest in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.1 This recent spate of scholarship has focused attention on Fichte’s distinctive contributions in an array of interrelated areas: the theory of self-consciousness, the theory of subjectivity, idealism, intersubjectivity, private property and political right, freedom, etc.2 In all these areas a common pattern has emerged: Fichte appropriates and radicalizes – sometimes beyond recognition – themes he found in Kant, often mediated by figures such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Friedrich Jacobi, or Salomon Maimon. What has been less systematically interrogated is Fichte’s contribution to the very idea of transcendental philosophy, transcendental inquiry or transcendental proof. There are a few notable exceptions, the most important of which is Gunter Zoller’s study, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy. But this is one of those cases where the exception proves the rule. For while Zoller emphasizes Fichte’s departures from Kant on many key points, when it comes to the theme of his title he generally emphasizes continuity. Zoller: ‘Historically speaking, Fichte’s project of a Wissenschaftslehre continues Kant’s development of a transcendental philosophy; it aims at a comprehensive account of the principles governing human knowledge and its world of objects.’3 And elsewhere: ‘Fichte retains the Kantian understanding of transcendental philosophy as a theory of experience.’4 One might accordingly conclude that Fichte simply did not have much to contribute on this score. Although he was a radical innovator in many areas, he essentially took over an unmodified Kantian construal of the parameters of transcendental investigation: transcendental philosophy is opposed on the one hand to 1 In referring to Fichte’s writings I have made use of the two standard editions. Where possible, I refer to the volume and page of I.H. Fichte, (ed.) Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sammtliche Werke (Berlin: Veit & Comp, 1845-6; reprint: Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), using the abbreviation SW. The pagination of SW is provided in most modern editions of Fichte’s works. For works not included in SW, I refer to R. Lauth et al. (eds.) J.G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964 ); page references to this edition are given with the abbreviation GA. English translations of many of the works cited here can be found in Breazeale 1988 and 1994. Citations to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason make use of the usual A and B numbering. 2 On Fichte’s contributions in these areas see inter alia: Henrich 1966 (on self-consciousness); Neuhouser 1990 (on subjectivity); Pippin 1989 (on idealism); Wood 2006 (on intersubjectivity); Merle, et al. 2001 (on political right). 3 Zoller 1998: 2. 4 Zoller 1998: 74.

The Transcendental Method and (Post-)Empiricist Philosophy of Science

This paper reconsiders the relation between Kantian transcendental reflection (including transcendental idealism) and 20th century philosophy of science. As has been pointed out by Michael Friedman and others, the notion of a “relativized a priori” played a central role in Rudolf Carnap’s, Hans Reichenbach’s and other logical empiricists’ thought. Thus, even though the logical empiricists dispensed with Kantian synthetic a priori judgments, they did maintain a crucial Kantian doctrine, viz., a distinction between the (transcendental) level of establishing norms for empirical inquiry and the (empirical) level of norm-governed inquiry itself. Even though Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions is often taken to be diametrically opposed to the received view of science inherited from logical empiricism, a version of this basically Kantian distinction is preserved in Kuhn’s thought. In this respect, as Friedman has argued, Kuhn is closer to Carnap’s theory of linguistic frameworks than, say, W.V. Quine’s holistic naturalism. Kuhn, indeed, might be described as a “new Kant” in post-empiricist philosophy of science. This article examines, first, the relativization of the Kantian a priori in Reichenbach’s work, arguing that while Reichenbach (after having given up his original Kantianism) criticized “transcendentalism”, he nevertheless retained, in a reinterpreted form, a Kantian-like transcendental method, claiming that the task of philosophy (of science) is to discover and analyze the presuppositions underlying the applicability of conceptual systems. Then, some reflections on Kuhn’s views on realism are offered, and it is suggested that Kuhn (as well as some other influential contributors to the realism debate, such as Hilary Putnam) can be reinterpreted as a (relativized, naturalized) Kantian transcendental idealist. Given the central importance of Kuhnian themes in contemporary philosophy of science, it is no exaggeration to claim that Kantian transcendental inquiry into the constitutive principles of empirical knowledge, and even transcendental idealism (as the framework for such inquiry), still have a crucial role to play in this field and deserve further scrutiny.

The Cartesian Paradigm of First Philosophy: A Critical Appreciation from the Perspective of Another (the Next?) Paradigm

There are several paradigms of 'first philosophy' (e.g. Aristotle, Descartes). A third paradigm of first philosophy is transcendental pragmatics or transcendental semiotics (exemplified by Peirce and Wittgenstein). Husserl correctly grasped that Descartes inaugurated first philosophy in the sense of a transcendental inquiry into the foundations of absolute knowledge. But Husserl's retrieval of Descartes remains within the second paradigm in that it ignores the role of language as a condition of the possibility of objectively constituted knowledge. I propose to re-examine Descartes's conception of first philosophy to see if it can be read in the light of the third paradigm of transcendental philosophy, namely transcendental semiotics. I argue that Cartesian methodic doubt can be rehabilitated (against Wittgenstein's critique) as a kind of 'fallibilistic' approach to knowledge of a Peircean kind, and that the Cartesian cogito can be read (following Hintikka) as recognition of performative contradiction and of the necessity of speech acts, and hence of the transcendental communication community.

Heidegger and Whitehead: a phenomenological examination into the intelligibility of experience

Martin Heidegger's Being and Time can be broadly termed a transcendental inquiry into the structures that make human experience possible. Such an inquiry reveals the conditions that render human experience intelligible. Using Being and Time as a model, I attempt to show that Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality not only aligns with Being and Time in opposing many elements of traditional Western philosophy but also exhibits a similar transcendental inquiry. With this reading, Process and Reality contains concepts much like Being-in-the-world, ecstatic temporality, and others found in Being and Time. More important, this interpretation considers Whitehead's treatment of human experience paradigmatic for understanding his cosmological scheme in general. Finally, the results of this study are employed to sketch a phenomenology of holy experience. - Prefatory Note to Heidegger and Whitehead

Review: Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry: Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology., by John A. Hodgson and The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry., by Michael O'Neill

Review: <i>Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry: Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology.</i>, by John A. Hodgson and <i>The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry.</i>, by Michael O'Neill

: Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry: Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology. . John A. Hodgson. ; The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry. . Michael O'Neill.

: Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry: Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology. . John A. Hodgson. ; The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry. . Michael O'Neill.