Transcendental Philosophy :: Paideia Philosophy Kant Papers

mysterious Philosophy One needs specific origin into the classics of abstruse philosophical system (Kants Criticism, Descartess Metaphysics, and Fichtes Doctrine of scientific discipline) because all say farewell to the common sense view of things. The threesome types of transcendental thinking converge in conceiving rational autonomy as the ultimate ground for justification. Correspondingly, the philosophical pedagogy of all three thinkers is focussed on how to seize and make that very autonomy (or active self-determination) intellectually and existentially available. In the concrete way of proceeding, however, the three models diverge. Descartes expects one to become scale 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 fellowship through individually acquiring the competence to judge the legitimacy of encount ered propositional claims. Finally, Fichte confronts us with the idea 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 school of thought. What the revolutionary achievements of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte have 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 contend to normal experience. (First of all, the common notion of things affecting us has to be abandoned.) Transcendental arguments are therefore all but common sense. They are in no respect realistic or ontologically dependent. (2) Whoever wants to get familiar with transcendental philosophy perhaps just in order to criticize one or several of its represent atives must overcome the threshold of open or underground realism and ordinary experience. One also has to avoid the common fault that transcendental reconstruction represents a form of i screwism. 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 clamber against the realist as well as the idealist tendencies of interpretation. Positively it is not sufficient for them to represent what is essential to transcendentalism as a genus they must especially transmit what is specific to Kants Criticism, to Descartes Metaphysics or to Fichtes Doctrine of Science.I. Rene Descartes was the low one to fully realize that reliable orientation could never passively be found in things or institutions.