Transcendentalism

The Kantian approach shifted the focus of epistemology to the study of the possibility conditions of our knowledge which, in particular, determine what are the modalities and the limits of our cognition and, consequently, of knowledge itself.

These possibility conditions that are presupposed by any cognition and independent from its possible contents are, in this sense, a priori or transcendental and determine the cognitive value of our representations. Therefore, this study of the cognitive capabilities of reason (often called also criticism) does not coincide with the arbitrary assumption that what we know are our representations, but simply accepts that we have representations and we investigate what cognitive value they may have. In this sense the “methodical doubt” of Descartes was a starting point of this ‘critical’ orientation in the search for certainty (a certainty, however that did not concern the fact that we ‘have’ a given representation, but that it represents reality). No wonder, therefore, that the subject matter of this kind of investigation is the broad world of representations, but always with the explicit or implicit aim of evaluating their cognitive value, and for this reason the problem of realism tacitly boils down to this research. This is why, for example, at the core of the phenomenological thinking we find the effort of overcoming the doubt by attaining a primordial evidence that is at the same time a (conscious) revival of the Cartesian approach and a recovery of the classical notion of the intentional identity of cognition and reality, along with the transcendental view of framing the possibility conditions of our knowledge.

The study of the possibility conditions of knowledge (that is, the transcendental point of view) has broadened considerably in the last hundred years, especially through the contributions of the hermeneutic movement and of the linguistic, sociologic, pragmatic approaches that, in a first stage, have favored anti-realist views, but more recently are showing interesting developments in the direction of various forms of realism.

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Source: Agazzi E. (ed.). Varieties of Scientific Realism: Objectivity and Truth in Science. Springer,2017. — 411 pp.. 2017

Transcendentalism

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