transcendental

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The adjective transcendental (from Latin transcendere , "to exceed") is used in epistemological contexts with reference to experience - it denotes ideas or cognitive functions that cannot be acquired through empirical experience, but whose validity must be assumed in order for the experience to be truthful has and thus knowledge and knowledge are possible. Since they go beyond any possible empirical experience, but are not detached from it ( transcendent ), Immanuel Kant describes this property as transcendental. This is also the name given to the investigation of the generally necessary conditions that enable knowledge and justify true convictions as knowledge - this is the program of transcendental philosophy, as Immanuel Kant formulated it in the Critique of Pure Reason : " I call all knowledge transcendental which to [...] our cognition of objects, so far these a priori should be possible at all busy. "( Immanuel Kant: AA III, 43 )

The property “transcendental” means a connection with the empirical knowledge of objects in general and in disregard of the special knowledge requirements of a specific object. Along this line, Kant defines the Transcendental Aesthetics as the doctrine of the conditions for the perception of something in general, and the Transcendental Logic as the doctrine of the intellectual part of object knowledge - in contrast to general formal logic, which, according to him, uses judgments and concepts independently of any object reference operate, and to the laws of a specific science that concern individual objects and properties.

In German idealism, Kant's program led to the claim that the transcendental, because it is a priori valid, can conclusively substantiate experience and knowledge . This claim was used in transcendental concepts - for example in those of Friedrich Schelling and Johann Gottlieb Fichte - for the construction of idealistic philosophies and romantic art theories. But this goes hand in hand - contrary to Kant's view - the claim or at least the longing to grasp the transcendent . This restored unity of cosmology and epistemology was also linked to American transcendentalism at the end of the 19th century .

Concept history

In scholastic philosophy the term transcendental is used in the field of ontology . It determines the unchangeable and general determinations of being and of being things that go beyond any specific category and therefore belong to being as such, "τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν". All things and all actions can be determined as valuable or less valuable depending on the degree of their participation in the transcendental being - the one, the true and the good. The idea of ​​participation was already discussed in Plato and Augustine .

In the 15th century, these ideas and the associated terms "transcendental" or "transcendental" were used in the context of translations and commentaries on newly accessible Greek, Latin and Arabic texts. Pedro da Fonseca and Francisco Suárez were among the first to write their own illustrations in the 16th century. Also Avicenna's metaphysics is one of them.

"Transcendental" or "transcendental" were used and changed in many other theological and philosophical treatises (especially in Thomas Aquinas ) on metaphysics and in dialectical disputes. They always expanded the terminology with which both theoretically and empirically God's work and human thought should be explained. They were through the following centuries and are in use up to the present neo-scholasticism. They were known to Kant through the writings of Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten , which they used for their metaphysics.

In § 12 of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant deals with the scholastic sentence “ quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum ”, which he describes as originating from the “transcendental philosophy of the ancients” (Immanuel Kant: AA III, 97). According to Kant, however, these metaphysical theorems about transcendentalities as properties of existence must be translated into epistemological principles of a possible experience in order to arrive at their true core. The most general determinations of being become the most general forms of knowledge.

Kant and Hume

Kant's and David Hume's programs for a foundation of the sciences differ in principle. For Hume it follows from his observations and conclusions that scientific knowledge does not have absolute certainty. They have to be continuously checked and adapted to empirical experience. For Hume there is only approximate certainty in mathematics , the knowledge of which is a priori valid because mathematics is a closed system. As an open system of a “science of man”, philosophy cannot conclusively prove anything, but can only make content plausible or understandable by describing observations. "The opposite of a so-called fact always remains possible [...] It is therefore of scientific interest to investigate the nature of certainty which convinces us of real existence and facts."

For Kant, who works towards a coherent, systematic ethic, the problem of induction is above all the stumbling block that Hume does not solve. Hume merely states that causal relationships are not directly observable. How causality is brought about can - according to Hume - be answered neither by experience nor by logical analysis. The fact that the term “causality” or certain cause-and-effect relationships are used in everyday and scientific statements that we consider valid is explained by “habit” due to the lack of alternatives. The validity of the term "causality" arises from repeated observation of two successive events. That causality is a valid principle of human guesswork and thought, as Hume puts it in general, “only results after a long series of uniform processes” that create certainty for the individual case. To assign necessity to this series , as required by a scientific law, is, according to Hume, an error or a hypothesis.

In contrast to Hume, Kant explains the fact that people determine causality by elevating causality to a pure concept of understanding, an a priori idea which, in the transcendental use of unity, underlies the cohesion of empirical experience in general. So he can claim that there must be causal connections, which he characterizes as synthetic judgments a priori , which are generally valid and necessary. It is only with this solution that Kant can answer the question of whether, despite Hume's attack, a metaphysics of nature and morality is still possible at all. Kant continues:

“Since I had succeeded in solving Humean's problem not only in a particular case, but with the intention of the whole faculty of pure reason: I was able to confidently, although always only to take slow steps, to finally reach the full extent of the pure reason Reason, in its limits as well as in its content, to determine completely and according to general principles, which then was what metaphysics needed in order to perform its system according to a certain plan. "

- Immanuel Kant: AA IV, 260-261

Neo-Kantianism and the 20th century

According to Friedrich Albert Lange , this is "the reason for all the errors of our reformer of philosophy": " [the] confusion of the methodical and art-appropriate handling of the laws of thought with so-called speculation, which deduces from general concepts." Such "deductions from concepts" constituted for Kant the core of his transcendental method.

According to the Neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband , the fundamental insight behind Kant's decision in favor of the transcendental method is that "the validity of the principles of reason is completely independent of the way in which they come about in empirical consciousness."

He also characterizes the transcendental philosophy as "new and absolutely original". You find “whole new problems” and “whole new terminology” to solve them. She be

"... the systematic reflection on the incontrovertible and inevitable, presuppositions and principles that are self-evident to every normally thinking person, without which there is no communication between those who think and no attempt to scientifically state any facts, no processing of them into knowledge."

Leonard Nelson even attacked the possibility of an epistemology in general, since this is always based on generally existing knowledge and therefore has to remain ad hoc and guesswork. For Hans Albert, this does not result in the impossibility of epistemology as such, but merely the impossibility of a pure epistemology. He interprets Kant's solution as a strategy of justification . This could be replaced by the application of fallibilism and critical realism . Kant's own approaches would then have to ...

  1. an empirical theory that explains knowing;
  2. an epistemology that sets goals and norms on the basis of factual possibilities and that (1) has;
  3. a methodology of scientific advances in knowledge that should be understood as a rational heuristic,

be transformed.

Even Karl Popper claimed, with the Critical Realism continue the critical transcendental philosophy of Kant. He expressly turned against the Kantians of the first generation, especially Jakob Friedrich Fries and his influential school. He assumed a psychologism , that is, a mixture of (empirical) psychology and epistemology, which could not always be ruled out even for Kant himself. For Popper, only a “transcendental method” remains of the transcendental cognitive apparatus of the forms of perception and concepts to critically measure the concepts and theses of an epistemology against the actual procedures of the sciences.

literature

  • Thomas Zwenger : Transcendental. In: Wulff D. Rehfus (Hrsg.): Manual dictionary philosophy (= Uni-Taschenbücher. No. 8208). 1st edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / UTB, Göttingen / Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-8252-8208-2 .

to the conceptual history:

  • Jan & nbspA. Aertsen: Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought. From Philip the Chancellor (c. 1225) to Francisco Suárez. Brill, Leiden 2012.
  • Karl Bärthlein: The transcendental doctrine of the old ontology. Part I: The Transcendental Doctrine in the Corpus Aristothelicum. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1972 ( limited preview ) in the Google book search
  • Hinrich Knittermeyer: The term transscendental in its historical development up to Kant. Marburg, Hamel 1920 ( archive.org ).
  • Günther Schulemann: The teaching of the transcendental in scholastic philosophy. Leipzig 1929.
  • Max von Zynda: Kant - Reinhold - Fichte. Studies on the history of the transcendental concept. Vaduz 1980.

on the method of transcendental philosophy in Kant:

  • Hans Albert: Critique of the pure epistemology . Tübingen 1987.
  • Ernst Cassirer: Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics. Historical and systematic studies on the causal problem . Hamburg 2004.
  • Nikolaus Knoepffler: The term "transcendental" in Kant. Munich 2001.
  • Michael Nerurkar: Amphibolism of the reflection concepts and transcendental reflection in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Würzburg 2012.
  • Karl R. Popper: The two basic problems of epistemology . Tubingen 1994.
  • Armando Rigobello: The limits of the transcendental in Kant. Munich 1968.
  • Wolfgang Röd: Dialectical Philosophy of the Modern Age . tape 1 . Munich 1974, p. 30th ff .

on the character and usefulness of so-called transcendental arguments:

  • Roderick Chisholm: What is a Transcendental Argument? In: New Issues for Philosophy. No. 14, 1978.
  • Moltke S. Gram: Do Transcendental Arguments have a Future? In: New Issues for Philosophy. No. 14, 1978.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ “Strictly speaking, the term 'transcendental' does not designate the method of critical philosophy, but the character of the question that guides it; Transcendental philosophy asks about conditions under which the objective validity of terms and sentences can be understood a priori as possible. ”( Wolfgang Röd : Die Philosophie der Neuzeit 3. Part 1: Critical Philosophy from Kant to Schopenhauer. Munich 2006, p . 33)
  2. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed .: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA III, 43  / KrV B 25.
  3. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed .: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA III, 97  / “ It can be found in the transcendental philosophy the ancients still present a main part, which contains pure intellectual concepts, which, [...] should count as concepts a priori of objects, [...] whether the use of this principle with the intention of the conclusions (which gave only tautological propositions) is very poor failed, [...] a thought that has survived for so long, however empty it may seem, always deserves an investigation of its origin, and justifies the assumption that it has its basis in some intellectual rule, the only , as is often the case, has been misinterpreted. ".
  4. ↑ Cf. on this section also Karl Bärthlein: Die Transzendentalienlehre der alten Ontologie. Pp. 1-5.
  5. ↑ See David Hume: An Inquiry into the Human Mind . VIII, 4.
  6. ↑ See David Hume: An Inquiry into the Human Mind . VII, 1.
  7. ↑ David Hume: An Inquiry into the Human Mind . IV, 2.
  8. ↑ David Hume: An Inquiry into the Human Mind . IV, 20th
  9. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed .: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA IV, 260-261 .
  10. ↑ Cf. for this section and quotations: Friedrich Albert Lange: History of materialism and criticism of its significance in the present. Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 488–492 (online)
  11. ^ Wilhelm Windelband: Textbook of the history of philosophy. 6th edition. Tübingen 1912, p. 447 (online)
  12. ^ Wilhelm Windelband: Immanuel Kant. To the secular celebration of his philosophy. In: Ders .: Preludes: Essays and speeches to introduce philosophy. Freiburg i. B. [u. a.] 1884, pp. 112-145, here p. 114 and 122 f. ( Digitized version of Heidelberg University ).
  13. ↑ Hans Albert: Critique of the pure epistemology . Mohr, Tübingen 1987, ISBN 3-16-945229-0 , p. 29 .
  14. ↑ Karl R. Popper: The two basic problems of the theory of knowledge. 3. Edition. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2010, p. 7 ( limited preview in the Google book search).