Transcendental Philosophy :: Paideia Philosophy Kant Papers

Transcendental Philosophy One needs specific initiation into the classics of transcendental philosophy (Kants Criticism, Descartess Metaphysics, and Fichtes Doctrine of Science) because all say farewell to the reciprocal sense view of things. The three types of transcendental thinking converge in conceiving apt autonomy as the ultimate ground for justification. Correspondingly, the philosophical pedagogy of all three thinkers is focused on how to seize and make that very autonomy (or dynamic self-determination) intellectually and existentially available. In the concrete way of proceeding, however, the three models diverge. Descartes expects one to become master of oneself and the world by methodologically suspending his judgement on what cannot qualify itself to be undoubtable. Kant leads us to the point where we can triangulate universal conditions of the possibility of knowledge through individually acquiring the competence to judge the legitimacy of encountered propositional cl aims. Finally, Fichte confronts us with the paper of the identity of self-consciousness and objectivity. (1)Transcending ordinary life and experience to a somewhat higher being is surely not the scope of transcendental philosophy. What the revolutionary achievements of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte collect generically in common is to account for the legitimacy of our knowledge claims or, in other words, for the possibility of autonomy. The business of that kind of philosophy is to rationally reconstruct the rightness of judging. For that design the architecture of those authors theorizing is necessarily opposed to normal experience. (First of all, the common notion of things affecting us has to be abandoned.) Transcendental arguments are therefore all scarcely common sense. They are in no respect realistic or ontologically dependent. (2) Whoever wants to get familiar with transcendentalism perhaps just in order to bump one or several of its deliveratives must overcome the thres hold of open or covert realism and ordinary experience. One also has to avoid the common misunderstanding that transcendental reconstruction represents a form of i partakeism. So this kind of philosophy seems to be a fortiori charged to give a good deal of pedagogical help for its own sake. The respective philosophical educations (paideiai) have to fight against the realist as well as the idealist tendencies of interpretation. Positively it is not enough for them to represent what is essential to transcendentalism as a genus they must particularly transmit what is specific to Kants Criticism, to Descartes Metaphysics or to Fichtes Doctrine of Science.I. Rene Descartes was the first one to full realize that reliable orientation could never passively be found in things or institutions.