The Destiny of Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract

Transcendental philosophies are not all of the same sort. They share a common philosophical motif in so far as they are “transcendental,” but otherwise they differ a great deal among themselves as much as idealisms or empiricisms do. This common motif is the search for a foundation for knowledge, thinking and experience. But not every founda-tionalism is transcendental philosophy. For example, many of the logical empiricists who held the view that the edifice of knowledge rests on basic, protocol sentences are far from being transcendental philosophers. It would seem that only certain kinds of foundational thinking deserve to be called transcendental. Foundationalism, as such, cannot constitute transcendental thinking. Perhaps we should say that the foundation sought after by the transcendental philosophies should be a priori. A formalistic philosophy which first sets up an a priori uninterpreted system and, then, assigns to it an interpretation comprehensive enough to include large features of experience, would still not be transcendental, for such an uninterpreted system would not be a foundation; it would rather be a formal-conceptual framework which illuminates, at most, certain formal structures of the world. But one may also seek to provide an a priori metaphysical foundation for experience.

Read in a symposium at the annual meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in November 1980 at the University of Ottawa. The other symposiasts were David Levin and Ronald Bruzina. The symposium was organised in response to Herbert Spiegelberg’s question at the SPEP meetings of the preceding year at Purdue: Is transcendental phenomenology still alive? (See Journal of the British Society f or Phenomenology 11 [1980], pp. 271–282.) This paper appeared in William McBride and Calvin Schrag (Eds.), Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983).