Transcendental Arguments

This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’
friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense of ‘touched’ that connotes affected and wounded. Derrida’s work instantiates what Husserl might call a transcendental pathology, in that it intermittently instantiates an ethics of non-presentist time (the time which is also the transcendental
condition for the event of friendship), and, by contrast, disparages the significance of what we might call an ethics of phronesis, a ‘lived’ friendship of ‘omni-temporal’ dispositions, and embodied and habitual patterns. I end this article by proposing a dialectic between the disjunctive and conjunctive aspects of time that does not accord any kind of a priori privilege to the one over the other.

Am I doing good?  My purpose in this essay is to explore whether a person may find ethical absolutes without reference to God.  My premise is that we ultimately need a transcendent source of values.  Keep in mind, I am not saying that only theists do good things.  In fact, many theists do bad things and many non-theists, including atheists, do a lot of good in the world.  My point is that we need some standard that tells us what are the good things being done and what are the bad things. My contention is that we need God to tell us when people, even atheists, are doing good things and when people, even theists, are doing bad things.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe contends that the fact that a person has the capacity to argue entails that she has the moral right of exclusive control over her own body. Critics of Hoppe’s argument do not appear to have pinpointed its flaws. I expose the logical structure of Hoppe’s argument, distinguishing its pragmatic-contradiction and its mutual-recognition components. I provide three counterexamples to show that Hoppe’s mutual-recognition argument is invalid and I argue that the truth that appears to motivate the argument is simply a banality. I show that Hoppe’s pragmatic-contradiction argument is invalid, has a false premise and fails to link up with his mutual-recognition argument in the way that he requires to reach his conclusion. I conclude by outlining three perils of pragmatic-contradiction arguments, the weakness of mutual-recognition arguments, and the implausibility of attempts to derive a universal moral status from a specialised activity such as argumentation.

تتناول هذه الدراسة بالمقارنة فيلسوفين من أهم فلاسفة العصر الحديث، إمانويل كانط مؤسس الفلسفة النقدية، وإدموند هوسرل مؤسس الفينومينولوجيا. وتهدف في المقام الأول توضيح أن فينومينولوجيا هوسرل تدين بأصولها لفلسفة كانط، وهي استمرار لأسلوب التفكير الذي ظهر في كتاب كانط "نقد العقل الخالص" والذي أطلق عليه "التحليلات الترانسندنتالية".
وعن طريق عقد مقارنات مفصلة بين الفيلسوفين، تثبت الدراسة قرباً بينهما ووحدة في النظرة والتوجهات: حضور القصدية بالمعنى الهوسرلي في نظرية كانط في العلاقة بين الأحكام والمقولات؛ اشتراك مفهوم "الترانسندنتالي" الكانطي ومفهوم "الفينومينولوجي" الهوسرلي في المعنى ونوعية ومستوى التحليل؛ رد أشكال الفكر إلى الأفعال المعرفية للوعي؛ معالجة المقولات القبلية على أنها أفعال ترانسندنتالية للوعي. كما تثبت أن في تحليلات كانط للمعرفة الإنسانية جانباً فينومينولوجياً واضحاً يستبق فينومينولوجيا هوسرل، وهو وضوح يجعل فلسفة هوسرل هي الامتداد الطبيعي والتوسع المنطقي لنظرية كانط في المعرفة.
ومثلما حاول الفارابي قديماً "الجمع بين رأيي الحكيمين أفلاطون وأرسطو" بتوضيح أن فلسفتيهما متفقتان في الأهداف والمقاصد على الرغم مما يبدو بينهما من اختلاف ظاهري، تطمح هذه الدراسة أيضاً الجمع بين رأيي كانط وهوسرل، عن طريق قراءة كانط قراءة هوسرلية، وقراءة هوسرل قراءة كانطية.

Much contemporary] moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance, or as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in [The Sovereignty of Good], as the privileged focus of attention or will. This philosophy has accredited a cramped and truncated view of morality in a narrow sense, as well as of the whole range of issues involved in the attempt to live the best possible life, and this not only among professional philosophers, but with a wider public. So much of my effort…will be directed towards enlarging our range of legitimate moral descriptions, and in some cases retrieving modes of thought and description which have misguidedly been made to seem problematic.

Recent developments in Continental metaphysics have involved calls to leave behind the transcendental as first forged by Kant. Against such calls, I plead for a gesture of, to paraphrase Marx, extracting the rational kernel of transcendentalism from the mystical shell of transcendental idealism. I lay claim to Hegel as the key forerunner for this maneuver. Moreover, debates about “transcendental arguments” in Analytic philosophical circles from the mid-twentieth century through today likewise explore the option of a de-idealized transcendentalism. For both Kant and Hegel as well as Analytics participating in the just-mentioned debates, the specter of skepticism looms large over the transcendental. Through putting Hegel’s tarrying with ancient and modern skepticisms into conversation with Analytic altercations between transcendentalists and skeptics, I propose a meta-transcendental, genetic-diachronic “error-first ontology” (EFO) as a necessary supplement to any transcendental, static-synchronic epistemology concerned with true knowledge. Prior to the problem of minded subjects coming to know worldly objects, there is the problem of how subjects capable of falling into falsity, illusion, etc. come into being in the first place. This intervention is a prelude to a rapprochement between transcendentalism and a (quasi-)naturalist materialism allied with the natural sciences.

For a number of years now, I have developed and defended a materialist theory of subjectivity under the heading of "transcendental materialism." The present piece gets underway in its first section here with me explaining why I have come to consider the descriptive label "critical-dialectical naturalism" synonymous with, if not preferable to, this heading. Recasting transcendental materialism as (also) critical dialectical naturalism signals several things. Starting with the term "critical," I embrace an idealist method (although not an idealist ontology) by beginning with spontaneous subjectivity. I do so with an eye to the sorts of epistemological requirements imposed by Kantian critique on any future metaphysics. Then, the term "dialectical" designates a procedure of moving beyond subjectivity taken as a starting point through delineating and mobilizing intra-subjective antagonisms, conflicts, and the like (i.e., dialectical dimensions of subjects identified by German idealism and psychoanalysis especially). In short, I dialectically reverse-engineer an ontology of pre/non-subjective nature out of a theory of more-than-natural subjectivity-this being the crux of critical-dialectical naturalism.

This paper critically examines three key works of analytic Kantianism: C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, and Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, focussing on their respective approaches to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction.

Re-examining Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by asking, What (if anything) do Kant’s premises, analyses and arguments in fact justify?, reveals that in several regards, Kant justified other, more important epistemological conclusions than he claimed, and that he did so independently of his Transcendental Idealism (Westphal 2004, 2006). Centrally important here is that Kant in fact provides two parallel, sound proofs of mental content externalism. These are proofs of this thesis: We human beings could not think of ourselves as persisting through apparent changes in what we (apparently) experience – nor could we think of the apparent spatio-temporal world of objects, events and people – unless in fact we are conscious of the actual spatio-temporal world and have at least some rudimentary knowledge of it. Such proofs turn, not on general facts about (or features of) the world, but on appreciating various fundamental regards in which our finite human cognizance depends upon the world we inhabit. The ‘transcendental’ character of these analyses concerns identifying and appreciating various fundamental features of our finite form of human mindedness, and basic constraints upon, and prospects of, cognitive justification within the non-formal domain of human empirical knowledge. Such analyses and proofs have been developed in various ways, using distinctive strategies, not only by Kant, but also by Hegel, C. I. Lewis, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and F. L. Will. These I return to below (§5, end); here I am concerned with the methodological reflections required to understand, assess and appreciate such transcendental proofs, and why so few analytic epistemologists – foremost amongst them: sceptics – have found them persuasive or illuminating.

Eine breite Mehrheit der gegenwärtigen anglo-amerikanischen Philosophen bekennt sich zur analytischen Philosophie und zu einem Naturalismus. So vage diese Benennungen auch sein mögen, sie bezeichnen zumeist eine bestimmte mehr implizite epistemisch-methodische und eine bestimmte ebenfalls implizite ontologische Festlegung, die eng mit der Ansicht zusammenhängen, dass vornehmlich die Naturwissenschaft als das Paradigma gelungener menschlicher Erkenntnis gilt. Es ist in diesem Zusammenhang kein Geheimnis, dass die Gründungsväter der modernen analytischen Philosophie sich klar gegen Hegels philosophische Grundposition wenden.

Ebenso ist es jedoch auch kein Geheimnis, dass sich in jüngerer Zeit immer mehr Zweifel an der Fruchtbarkeit des Programms des Logischen Empirismus und seiner nachfolgenden Positionen mehren. Ohne Zweifel hat sich seit den 1950er Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts ein sehr grundlegender Wandel in der analytischen Tradition vollzogen, der zugleich auch eine erneute vorsichtige Hegel-Rezeption in konstruktiv-systematischer, und nicht mehr nur historisch-polemischer Hinsicht in einigen Kreisen jener Strömung ermöglicht hat.Wir begegnen damit dem nun nicht mehr gänzlich ungewöhnlichen Phänomen, dass sich nicht nur 'kontinentale Philosophen', sondern zunehmend auch 'analytische' Zunftgenossen in Fragen der Epistemologie produktiv ohne Angst – und sogar ohne Abscheu – vorsichtig Hegel zuwenden

Pointiert zugespitzt soll die These vertreten werden, dass einerseits eine methodische Verkürzung der Vernunft auf den Verstand und in ontischer Hinsicht eine Verkürzung des Begriffs der Realität auf eine 'partikularistisch' verstandene Natur sowie eine damit einhergehende stark dualistische Entgegensetzung von Einzelheit der Natur und Allgemeinheit des Geistes die Ursachen für die zu skizzierenden Probleme des Naturalismus sind.


Es soll somit igezeigt werde, dass nicht unbedingt immer der aktive Rückgriff auf Hegel selbst, aber doch mehr und mehr hegelsche Motive und Einsichten in der epistemischen Debatte der analytischen Philosophie um sich greifen: Hegels Analyse der Größe und Grenzen des Empirismus zeigen eine erstaunliche Aktualität. Doch hat die derzeitige Annäherung an Hegel seine deutlichen Grenzen, auf die ebenfalls hingewiesen wird. Es kann maximal von einer vorsichtigen Annäherung, aber nicht von einer Rückkehr zu Hegel gesprochen werden, wie abschließend festzuhalten sein wird.

Betrachten wird zunächst (1) die epistemische und ontische Startaufstellung in der Konstitutionsphase der analytischen Philosophie, um sodann (2) einen knappen Blick auf drei Motive der hegelschen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Empirismus und der kritischen Philosophie zu werfen, so dass (3) abschließend einige wesentliche Veränderungen in der Tradition der analytischen Philosophie skizziert werden können, die ein Abrücken von den sehr stark anti-hegelschen Intuitionen der ersten Phase darstellen.

In this paper, I aim to account for Kant's position on space and time that he takes in the Critique of Pure Reason: that they are a priori intuitions that we bring to the world exclusively through our minds, and one of the conditions for the possibility of experience in general. He makes his case in the form of a series of arguments in the section The Transcendental Aesthetic, and I go through them here.

I distinguish between two phases of Rorty’s naturalism: “nonreductive physicalism” (NRP) and “pragmatic naturalism” (PN). NRP holds that the vocabulary of mental states is irreducible that of physical states, but this irreducibility does not distinguish the mental from other irreducible vocabularies. PN differs by explicitly accepting a naturalistic argument for the transcendental status of the vocabulary of agency. Though I present some reasons for preferring PN over NRP, PN depends on whether ‘normativity’ can be ‘naturalized’.

La deduzione trascendentale nella Critica della ragion pura è un argomento forte, scettico-resistente, e non soltanto l’analisi di un dato (la scienza matematica della natura), come vuole la tradizione interpretativa che viene da Cohen e Cassirer. Ma per giustificare, in senso forte, la pretesa di validità delle nostre conoscenze a priori – cioè dell’elemento di universalità presente in ogni conoscenza empirica – è necessario approfondire il problema stesso della conoscenza rivolgendosi alle condizioni del pensiero. Per capire come è possibile conoscere, dobbiamo chiederci come è possibile pensare: è quello che fa la deduzione trascendentale delle categorie, qui esaminata nelle due versioni del 1781 (A) e del 1787 (B). L’ipotesi di questo saggio è che la prima versione è la chiave per intendere la seconda, di cui è come il non-detto: i risultati raggiunti, in A, con il trapasso della deduzione soggettiva in quella oggettiva, sono ormai completamente assorbiti e resi direttamente operativi nella deduzione senz’altro oggettiva di B. Ma per comprendere davvero quest’ultima bisogna leggerle sinotticamente, per seguire il percorso dall’una all’altra.

ABSTRACT: The free-energy principle states that all systems that minimize their free energy resist a tendency to physical disintegration. Originally proposed to account for perception , learning, and action, the free-energy principle has been applied to the evolution, development, morphology, anatomy and function of the brain, and has been called a postulate, an unfalsifiable principle, a natural law, and an imperative. While it might afford a theoretical foundation for understanding the relationship between environment , life, and mind, its epistemic status is unclear. Also unclear is how the free-energy principle relates to prominent theoretical approaches to life science phenomena, such as organicism and mechanism. This paper clarifies both issues, and identifies limits and prospects for the free-energy principle as a first principle in the life sciences.

In the chapter on conscience and guilt in Being and Time, Heidegger makes transcendental claims to the effect that Dasein's Being-guilty is the condition of possibility of factical guilt—guilt for specific misdeeds. In this article, I reconstruct Heidegger's transcendental argument. To do so, I distinguish factical guilt from (what I call) ontic guilt and ontological guilt and explain why Dasein's ontic guilt is a necessary condition of possibility of Dasein's factical guilt and why ontic guilt, in turn, is necessarily conditioned by Dasein's ontological guilt, or Dasein's ownmost Being-guilty. In the process, I provide an interpretation of the two “nullities” that constitute Dasein's Being-guilty according to Heidegger. I end the paper with thoughts on why Dasein's Being-guilty is only a necessary yet not a sufficient condition of factical guilt in general and factical moral guilt in particular.

If novels can be arguments, that fact should shape logic or argumentation studies as well as literary studies. Two senses the term ‘narrative argument’ might have are (a) a story that offers an argument, or (b) a distinctive argument form. I consider whether there is a principled way of extracting a novel’s argument in sense (a). Regarding the possibility of (b), Hunt’s view is evaluated that many fables and much fabulist literature inherently, and as wholes, have an analogical argument structure. I argue that a better account is that some novels inherently exhibit a transcendental argument structure.

Celem niniejszej pracy jest przedstawienie zagadnienia specyficznej formy
myślenia jaką jest myślenie transcendentalne. Zagadnienie to wymaga jednocześnie
przedstawienia historycznych warunków w których rodzi się Kantowski projekt filozofii
transcendentalnej, a także dokładnej oraz szczegółowej analizy i wykładni struktury oraz
metody konstrukcji teoretycznej filozofii Kanta. Zgodnie z przyjętą przez Kanta definicją
światowego pojęcia filozofii konstrukcja taka musi zostać odniesiona do bezwarunkowych
celów. Dlatego też pomocniczym tematem pracy jest problem teleologii i definicji
człowieczeństwa.

In this paper I introduce the transcendental argument for Christian theism in the context of Reformed theologian and philosopher Cornelius Van Til’s thought. I then present the critique proffered by Barry Stroud against ambitious transcendental arguments, and survey various formulations of transcendental arguments in the literature, seeking how the objection bears upon them. I argue that Adrian Bardon’s (2005) interpretation is the most helpful in understanding the Stroudian objection. From this interpretation, two types of possible rebuttals are deduced. Proceeding to survey the responses offered by Van Tillians to this objection in the recent literature, I discern two general strategies pursued in these responses, which map onto the previously deduced types of rebuttals: the Biblical justification strategy and the objection-undermining strategy. I argue that all the specific attempts to answer Stroud which I examine here (those of Butler, Bosserman, and Fluhrer) are inadequate and that these two strategies, in general, face serious problems. I conclude with considering the options before the proponent of the transcendental argument for Christian theism and with offering a new objection to the argument, which focuses on its inconsistency with the implications of Christian theism itself.

El tema del libro es la fundamentación ético discursiva propuesta por Karl-Otto Apel en el marco de su pragmática trascendental. El examen crítico de esta propuesta filosófica tiene el objetivo de reforzar los argumentos a favor de una fundamentación trascendental de la ética. Se enfrenta inicialmente a la pragmática apeliana con una serie de críticas provenientes del debate analítico sobre los “argumentos trascendentales”, iniciada en los años sesenta del siglo XX. Se reconstruyen tres líneas principales: una que atañe a la forma de los argumentos trascendentales,  otra a su capacidad para demostrar validez objetiva, y la otra a su capacidad  para demostrar la unicidad de un esquema conceptual (iniciadas respectivamente por M. Gram, B. Stroud y S. Körner).
La discusión y posterior aplicación a Apel de  las críticas de este debate conduce a tres conclusiones principales. La primera  es que no existen razones concluyentes en contra de realizar una reflexión trascendental sobre las condiciones de posibilidad del conocimiento válido. La segunda es que la fundamentación trascendental debe hacerse en el marco de un  modelo filosófico dialógico y auto-reflexivo (diferente al asumido por los  autores del debate). Precisamente, la tercera conclusión es que todo método trascendental debe ser “interno”, es decir, debe asumir las condiciones que  investiga. Se aborda entonces el problema de concebir un  método que asuma la circularidad de la investigación y le dé un contenido  concreto a la fundamentación. En lugar de la fórmula apeliana, se sostiene la conveniencia de entender la pragmática trascendental como una continuación, corregida en un sentido trascendental, de la hermenéutica iniciada por Heidegger y renovada por Gadamer. Un método interno “hermenéutico trascendental” puede describirse con los rasgos de la  dialogicidad, la auto-reflexión y la crítica del sentido. El interés  fundamental es, como para Apel, la reconstrucción de aquellos presupuestos que  conforman la base de la ética discursiva, la cual transforma de manera comunicativa el imperativo categórico kantiano. Se discute finalmente la cuestión de cómo es  posible pensar que los presupuestos argumentativos no están sometidos a cambios históricos. La respuesta apunta a señalar que la objeción de “otra razón  posible” carece de argumentos sustantivos en contra de la fundamentación.

Wittgenstein sought to uphold ‘realism without empiricism’. This paper identifies in Wittgestein’s and in Kant’s philosophies a common line of argument that provides a genuinely transcendental argument for (not from) mental content externalism. This line of argument has not been previously recognized in either thinker’s work. The common thesis defended by both Wittgenstein and Kant alike is that, if we human beings did not inhabit a natural world structured by a recognizable degree of similarity and variety among the objects or events we perceive, we could not so much as think, so we could not so much as be self-conscious. (This line of argument is independent of Kant’s idealism, and ultimately shows that Kant’s transcendental idealism is false and unsupportable.)

According to Ian Hacking’s Entity Realism, unobservable entities that scientists carefully ‎manipulate to study other phenomena are real. Although Hacking presents his case in an intuitive, ‎attractive, and persuasive way, his argument remains elusive. I present five possible readings of ‎Hacking’s argument: a no-miracle argument, an indispensability argument, a transcendental ‎argument, a Vichian argument, and a non-argument. I elucidate Hacking’s argument according to ‎each reading, and review their strengths, their weaknesses, and their compatibility with each other.  ‎

This paper has three aims. The first and most important is to show that there are at least two independent views in the literature about the nature of a transcendental argument: the first dates back to Strawson (1959), the second to Stroud (1968). Strawson’s transcendental argument (1959) is a metaphysical argument in favor of a fundamental ontology of bodies. He was concerned with the Humean reductionist attempt to account for our natural belief in the existence of bodies as a logical construction from sense-impressions. In contrast, Stroud’s transcendental argument (1968) is epistemological in nature. It is conceived as an argument that aims to refute the global skeptic of Humean provenance by proving that we do know the existence of bodies. My second aim is to show that Stroud’s conception of a transcendental argument, however modestly it is conceived, is doomed to fail. In the face of the logical independence of the metaphysical question from the epistemological one, my third aim is to show that Strawson’s original transcendental arguments are immune to Stroud’s criticisms.

Tripartite soul apologetics--Cumulative case apologetics and the epithymotic, thymotic and noetic aspects of the soul of man as framework or organizing principle.  Pesuppositionalism relates to the noetic function, evidentialism and classical apologetics relate to the thymotic function, and existential and social appeals relate to the epithymotic function.

Der Text analysiert Hegels Vergleich zwischen dem edlen Wesen der "alten Skepsis" und dem seichten Wesen der Neuen Skepsis. Hegels Grundidee dabei ist, dass ein Angriff gegen Verstandesdualismen notwendig ist, um überhaupt zur Philosophie zu gelangen, die damit über den Common Sense des Verstandes hinaus gehen muss. Die neue Skepsis hingegen beruft sich hauptsächlich auf das im Verstand und in den empirischen Wissenschaften Gegebene, um gegen die Wahrheitsansprueche der Philosophie zu argumentieren, die fälschlicherweise versuche, eine „Wahrheit an sich“ außerhalb des Bewusstseins zu erreichen. Hegels Kritik an diesem falschen Dualismus zwischen „Welt an sich“ und „Wahrheit für uns“ wird skizziert, um einige Parallelen zwischen den neuen Skeptizismus und der gegenwärtigen Lage der Epistemologie zu ziehen und so der Frage nach zu gehen, welche Aktualität Begründungsfiguren der klassischen Deutschen Philosophie im gegenwärtigen Kontext besitzen könnten..

From my correspondence with an African American who intends to study Egyptology and learn Egyptian Hieroglyphics in order to explore issues related to African Originality, Identity, Integrity and Spirituality. Although I am Muslim, I am convinced that Ancient Egypt, Egyptian History, Religions & Divine Sciences, if sought after in an unbiased and non-colonial academic manner, constitute - for any African - a more direct path to Truth than today's decayed Islam.

After all, the monotheistic aspects of Ancient Egypt were tantamount to real and true Islam for millennia before Prophet Muhammad was born, and this was the quintessence of his preaching. Ancient Egyptians' Sacred Texts revealed the same spiritual and material reality as the Holy Quran. And this truth was concealed by both, the Jesuit - Freemasonic -Zionist elites and today's ignorant, idiotic, fake Islamic, and Satanic sheikhs, who are the globalist elite's most dangerous tools.
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/cognitive-science-ancient-egypt-what-did-pharaoh-narmers-times-egyptians-know-and-how/

En la última etapa de su vida, más precisamente en los Zollikoner Seminaren, Heidegger señala que aquello que ha llamado ontología no es sino otro nombre para lo que Kant llamara lo trascendental. Una indicación semejante no puede sino llamar nuestra atención.

The aim of this article is to shed some light on the sense – possibilities and limits – of transcendental phenomenological descriptions. Taking my starting point in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s original accounts of the phenomenological method of transcendental description, I critically examine and develop the notion by discussing what I take to be two of the most significant doubts against this kind of procedure: first, the objection that transcendental descriptions are inherently subjectivist; second, the objection that they are essentialist in nature. In my article I argue that transcendental descriptions cannot and need not involve any notion of the transcendental subject as their basic field of description, nor any claim to establish the essential transcendental structures necessarily constituting different kinds of experience. Instead, I suggest that what transcendental descriptions can do is to project, on the basis of descriptions of particular experiences, general paradigms of meaning whose range and explanatory force is principally open and shows itself in their de facto ability to illuminate the particular experiences and situations we encounter.

In this paper I present an interpretation of J. G. Fichte’s transcendental argument for the necessity of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) in Foundations of Natural Right. Fichte’s argument purports to show that, as a condition of the possibility of self-consciousness, we must take ourselves to stand in relations of mutual recognition with other agents like ourselves. After reconstructing the steps of Fichte’s argument, I present what I call the ‘modal dilemma’, which highlights a serious ambiguity in Fichte’s deduction. According to the modal dilemma, the conclusion to Fichte’s transcendental argument—that as a condition of the possibility of our self-consciousness, we must recognize and be recognized by others—expresses either metaphysical or normative necessity. However, no normative conclusion follows from Fichte’s premises, and the metaphysical claim that does follow from his argument appears to be implausibly strong. Thus the argument looks like a failure on either interpretation of the conclusion’s modality. In the penultimate section of the paper, I propose a new interpretation of the argument that avoids the modal dilemma and provides a normative grounding of Fichte’s concept of right.

Abstract: In the contemporary literature, transcendental arguments are presented either as ambitious truth-directed arguments with an anti-sceptical agenda (only to be castigated soon afterwards for failing to deliver robust ontological conclusions) or they are interpreted as intending (and succeeding) to deliver only modest epistemic conclusions about the structures of knowledge. Either way the discussion of transcendental arguments has been governed by the question of how transcendental arguments position themselves in relation to the sceptical challenge. This paper explores a transcendental strategy that is neither truth-directed nor epistemically modest and offers an alternative to the dichotomy between ontologically immodest and epistemically humble transcendental arguments that has characterized much of the contemporary discussion concerning the role and character of transcendental arguments.
Key words: transcendental arguments, pragmatism, Kant, Collingwood

ABSTRACT:  The couple “philosophy of the concept” and “of the subject” distinguishes contemporary positions regarding philosophical fundamentation. The first understands the subject as an effect, and then implies a radical transformation of the philosophical task. As Lecourt has shown, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus attacks the conception of philosophy as a discourse of fundamentation, assuming that this discourse produces first a break (between thought and being) and then tries to fit it through a discourse that guarantees the contact between the two fields previously instituted by the break. Absence of doubts concerning the meaning of propositions sets the Tractatus in the path of a regressive reasoning that not result in a transcendental argument because of the thesis on the impossibility of meta-language. The Philosophical investigations realized that this attack was still captive of one philosophical object (meaning) and try to eliminate it showing how it destroys itself when it enters in touch with rough practice of language. The absence of doubts is not anymore a sign of a fundamental semantic “knowledge”, but a constitutive element of the practice of the languagegames, functioning as a requirement imposed over individuals in order to obtain and keep their condition of speakers, a position which is close to the conception of ideology developed by Althusser. We conclude showing some limitations of Wittgenstein’s thought the category of philosophy of the concept allows us recognize.
RESUMEN: El par “filosofía del concepto” y “del sujeto” distingue posiciones contemporáneas respecto a la fundamentación filosófica. Las primeras, al concebir al sujeto como un efecto, suponen una transformación radical de la labor filosófica. Como Lecourt ha mostrado, el Tractatus combate contra la concepción de la filosofía como un discurso de unificación y fundamentación, suponiendo que este discurso produce primero una herida (entre pensamiento y ser), para cicatrizarla luego con un discurso que garantiza el contacto entre los dominios instaurados por la herida. La ausencia de dudas sobre el significado puso al Tractatus en la senda de un razonamiento regresivo, que no devino trascendental por la imposibilidad del metalenguaje. Las Investigaciones filosóficas advirtieron que este embate estaba todavía cautivo de un objeto filosófico, el
significado, e intentaron eliminarlo mostrando cómo el mismo se destruye al entrar en contacto con la áspera práctica del lenguaje. La carencia de dudas ya no será el índice de un “saber” semántico fundamental, sino un elemento constitutivo de la práctica de los juegos de lenguaje, donde funciona como un requisito impuesto a los hablantes para detentar su condición de tales, aproximándolo a la concepción de la ideología desarrollada por Althusser. Concluimos mostrando algunos límites del pensamiento de Wittgenstein que su inclusión en la categoría de la filosofía del concepto habilita reconocer.

Les arguments transcendantaux mettent en évidence ce que nous ne pouvons pas éviter de présupposer lorsque nous avons adopté une stratégie de recherche. Une philosophie des sciences capable d'en faire usage dépasse l’alternative habituelle entre une approche réaliste qui justifie le succès des théories physiques par leur représentation asymptotiquement fidèle d’une réalité indépendante, et une approche anti-réaliste qui se contente de l’adéquation empirique des théories. La méthode des arguments transcendantaux est appliquée au cas de la physique quantique. Dans cette perspective, la théorie quantique est comprise comme la traduction formelle d’un présupposé très général de la recherche expérimentale : sa décision d’intervenir dans le cours des choses pour en recueillir la réponse sous des conditions maîtrisées.

In this paper, I would like to unravel the metaphysical meaning of the expression “transcendental arguments” that has been overshadowed by the traditional epistemological meaning that emerged in the Sixties. The difference may seem subtle, but actually it is of utmost philosophical importance. We have here at least two different types of scepticism, one of which has been overlooked in the literature on transcendental arguments. The first is well the known Hume-like epistemological sceptic who doubts the existence of mind-independent permanent things in space and the knowledge thereof. The second is Hume-like metaphysical sceptic who doubts the ontological import of granting the existence of mind-independent permanent things in space. I shall argue that when conceived as an argument against the Hume-like epistemological external-world sceptic it is doomed to fail, but when conceived as an argument against the Hume-like metaphysical external-world sceptic the argument is sound and convincing: the underlying nature of bodies is made up of out external, mind-independent particulars that appear to us as permanent things in space, but which are unknown in themselves.

My aim is to show that there is a crucial ambiguity about the nature of transcendental arguments in the historical Stroud-Strawson debate. Transcendental arguments can be understood either as arguments against (Hume- like) skeptics or as arguments against (Hume-like) revisionary metaphysicians (reductionist idealists). In the first case, what is in question is the unperceived existence of particulars (and the knowledge thereof). In contrast, in the second meaning, what is in question is the underlying nature of those unperceived particulars. In this paper, I support two claims. First, I argue that when the target is a Hume-like skeptic, the transcendental argument is doomed to fail even when they are conceived more modestly as Strawson and Stroud have suggested in the eighties. In this regard, I argue that any anti-skeptical transcendental argument relies on the principle of epistemic closure, and what is modus ponens for the Kantian is modus tollens for the skeptic. Second, I present a reconstruction of the original Strawsonian transcendental argument as an argument against a Hume-like revisionary metaphysician, and argue that it is successful as far as any argument can be.

The major debate in late twentieth-century analytical philosophy turns on the questions of the purpose, uniqueness and results of transcendental arguments. I pursue this debate in reference to Fichte the first thinker after Kant (and before Cohen, Cassirer, Apel, etc.), to claim the title of “transcendental philosopher”. In this respect, it is to be noted that while only two instances of transcendental argument may be taken seriously in the works of Kant, Fichte's Science of Knowing is in all significant respects the most accomplished and systematic development of what Strawson has called transcendental argumentation. More than that, Fichte's mode of reasoning is what unifies and gives continuity to the successive versions of his science of knowing, thus suggesting a form of transcendental argument that potentially has great significance for the contemporary debate. In this perspective, it is useful to reassess in the light of Fichte's philosophy  a series of major questions raised by analytical philosophy: How is transcendental argument related to skepticism? How original and specific is it? And, last but not least, what does it accomplish?