Kant[edit]
It was Immanuel Kant who gave transcendental arguments their name and notoriety. It is open to controversy, though, whether his own transcendental arguments should be classified as progressive or regressive.[8]
In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant developed one of philosophy's most famous transcendental arguments in 'The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding'.[9] In the 'Transcendental Aesthetic', Kant used transcendental arguments to show that sensory experiences would not be possible if we did not impose their spatial and temporal forms on them, making space and time "conditions of the possibility of experience".
As stated above, one of the main uses of transcendental arguments is to appeal to something that cannot be consistently denied to counter skeptics' arguments that we cannot know something about the nature of the world. One need not be a skeptic about those matters, however, to find transcendental arguments unpersuasive. There are a number of ways that one might deny that a given transcendental argument gives us knowledge of the world. The following responses may suit some versions and not others.