History of the Transcendental Turn: Day 2

Stephen Darwall presented a paper entitled ‘Why Moral Obligation and the Dignity of Persons are not Transcendental Conditions of the Possibility of Agency, but are of the Second Person Standpoint’. In it he argued that Kant’s arguments for the thesis that any form of practical agency presupposes autonomy of the will, and thus the categorical imperative, are flawed. He argued that there is a systematic reason why Kant’s arguments fail: they are presented from the first-person standpoint. Once it is seen that second-personal relations depend on each agent involved binding themselves, and expecting others to be bound by, practical norms, it can also be seen that such relations require each agent involved being capable of binding themselves by the categorical imperative.

Sebastien Roedl gave a paper entitled 'Pure Knowledge'. In it he argued that contemporary philosophers have a debased view of transcendental philosophy as concerned with disproving external world scepticism via transcendental arguments about the conditions of possibility of empirical knowledge. He claimed that this was a not the correct way to understand transcendental philosophy as practised by Kant and Hegel. This is because such philosophy is concerned not so much with empirical knowledge but pure knowledge of the a priori forms of cognition. He further argued that as a route to pure knowledge transcendental philosophy offers a bulwark against 'logical nihilism' - the view that there is no universal logical form and thus no universal form of thinking. To show how transcendental philosophy might ward off logical nihilism he analysed Kant’s treatment of judgement and Hegel’s treatment of the relation between teleological and causal explanation.

In his paper, "'One Single Way of Knowing': Merleau-Ponty and Transcendental Philosophy", Joel Smith argued against two recent interpretations of Merleau-Ponty as a transcendental philosopher. He argued that two central ways of counting as a transcendental philosopher are both committed to taking a certain stance towards both apriority and necessity. Merleau-Ponty's views on these notions are far from clear. What seems certain, however, is that Merleau-Ponty rejected the distinction between the apriori and the empirical as traditionally conceived. Thus, whilst a number of Merleau-Ponty's statements have the appearance of transcendental claims, that appearance should not be taken at face value.

Beatrice Han Pile's paper, "Transcendental Aspects, Naturalistic Elements and Ontological Commitments in Nietzsche's Thought", was an attempt to articulate just what is transcendental and what is naturalistic in Nietzsche's writings. She argued that Nietzsche puts forward 'naturalised apriori conditions' and in such a way that makes it impossible to properly characterise him either as a transcendental philosopher or as a naturalist. Intimately related to this account is an account of Nietzsche's so-called 'error theory' as a critical, and non-literal warning directed against a certain kind of naivety concerning the scope and objects of human knowledge.


Henry Allison gave a paper entitled "From Transcendental Realism to Transcendental Idealism: The Nature and Significance of Kant's 'Transcendental Turn'". He argued that transcendentalism as understood by Kant’s rationalist forebears was a metaphysica generalis and as such a knowledge of things in general (that is, a knowledge of objects that abstracts from any specific mode of epistemic access). Kant’s transcendental turn must then be seen as a deflationary restriction on the scope of such knowledge. This restriction is justified by appeal to the thesis that space and time are forms of intuition, so that knowledge gained by means of them does not extend to things as they are in themselves. That this restriction thesis does not incoherently rest on ontological claims about the nature of appearances and things in themselves, can be more readily understood once we see that it is merely an epistemic restriction on the scope of our knowledge of things in general.