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".

First, critics respond by claiming that the arguer cannot be sure that he or she is having particular experiences. That a person cannot be sure about the nature of his or her own experiences may initially seem bizarre. However, it may be claimed that the very act of thinking about or, even more, describing our experiences in words, involves interpreting them in ways that go beyond so-called 'pure' experience.

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Second, skeptics object to the use of transcendental arguments to draw conclusions about the nature of the world by claiming that even if a person does know the nature of his or her experiences, that person cannot know that the reasoning from these experiences to conclusions about the world is accurate.

[10]

Lastly, critics have debated whether showing that we must think of the world in a certain way, given certain features of experience, is tantamount to showing that the world answers to that conception. Perhaps transcendental arguments show only the necessities of our cognitive apparatus rather than the realities of the world apart from us. This objection may amount to throwing doubt on whether transcendental arguments are ever more than merely "regressive".

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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.

Transcendental idealism

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Transcendental argument for the existence of God

Brueckner, Anthony. " Transcendental Arguments I". Nous 17 (4): 551-575. and "Transcendental Arguments II". Nous 18 (2): 197-225.

Stapleford, Scott Kant's Transcendental Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason - Continuum Publishing 2008 ( 978-0-8264-9928-8 - hb)

ISBN

Stern, Robert, ed.Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospect. Oxford: Clarendon.

. "Transcendental Arguments". Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968) 241-56.

Stroud, Barry

Taylor, Charles. "The Validity of Transcendental Arguments". Reprinted in Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.

at PhilPapers

Transcendental arguments

. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

"Transcendental arguments"

at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project

Transcendental arguments