Abstract
The dispute about transcendental arguments has dominated analytic philosophy for the last fifty years;1 it is here that the support (or nonsupport) of reference to Kant’s transcendental philosophy is played out in our contemporary world. I seek here to compare the dispute over transcendental argumentation at the heart of analytic philosophy with Fichte’s conception of such argumentation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
So Sandra Laugier recalls in “Langage, scepticisme et argument transcendantal,” in La querelle des arguments transcendantaux, ed. Stéphane Chauvier (Caen: Université de Caen, 2000), 11–34, at 11. She adds, “It is particularly difficult to know, despite (or due to) all the discussions that have taken place on the subject, what transcendental arguments consist of” (12).
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966), esp. 72–89.
I borrow this definition from Stélios Virvidakis, “Les arguments transcendantaux et le problème de la justification de la normativité morale,” Philosophies 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 109–128.
Virvidakis in his turn has taken this definition from A. W. Moore, “Conative transcendental arguments and the question whether there can be external reasons,” in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, ed. Robert Stern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 271–292, at 271.
As Michel Bitbol, who is interested in the use of transcendental arguments in quantum physics, has emphasized, “transcendental arguments [have] absolutely nothing to tell us from an ontological point of view.” Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne,” in La querelle des arguments transcendantaux, ed. Stéphane Chauvier (Caen: Université de Caen, 2000), 81–101, at 81; emphasis added.
Barry Stroud, “Transcendental arguments,” Journal of Philosophy 65, no. 9 (May 2, 1968), 241–256.
I am here summarizing what I have historically and philologically established in my various books and articles on Kant and the immediate post-Kantian period. I obviously cannot again present all the details of the argument, but I draw upon these claims demonstrated elsewhere. I make reference to these more specific analyses in the notes. See my books, Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, Critique de la representation: Études sur Lichte (Paris, Vrin, 2000); Lichte: Réflexion et argumentation (Paris, Vrin, 2004); and The Death of Philosophy, trans. R. A. Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 190. He also very often expresses this as an identity between a proposition’s form and its material (1794), and as I have said, as the identity between the “Tun” and the “Sagen” or “what is done and its doing” (1804). Finally, he expresses it less technically as “the pure I can never contradict itself” in, for example, “Some lectures concerning the scholar’s vocation,” in Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 144–184, at 149.
A certain reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, bk. IV (Gamma), ch. 4, could show that Aristotle had recourse to this kind of argument to refute the Sophist who would deny the principle of noncontradiction (the formal principle). Indeed, to deny it, the Sophist would be obligated to employ it: his “doing” would not be “in agreement with what he says,” and as Aristotle notes, he could no longer speak. Aristotle concludes, “one who is in this condition will not be able either to speak or to say anything intelligible”; Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 4: 1008b9, in The Basic Writings of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 742. This argument was thus clearly known for a long time and was one of the tools for refuting skepticism. Fichte’s specific contribution is to make it the principle of principles, the foundation of any philosophical discourse, the starting point for all propositions to come, and thus a positive principle and no longer (as it was for Aristotle) a negative argument (i.e., the argument from absurdity).
Jaakko Hintikka, La philosophie des mathématiques chez Kant: La structure de l’argumentation transcendantale, trans. Corinne Hoogaert (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), 4 (in the introduction to this French translation).
We adopt the translation of this term by Daniel Breazeale; see, for example, the translation of the System of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), glossary, 346.
About these objections, consult the presentation of Robert Stern, Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999),
as well as the article of Stélios Virvidakis, “Les arguments transcendantaux et le problème de la justification de la normativité morale,” Philosophiques 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 109–128.
W. V. O. Quine, “Naturalism; or, Living within One’s Means,” Dialectica 49, 264 (1994): 261.
Eugen Fink, “Réflexions phénoménologiques sur la théorie du sujet,” in Epokhe, 1 (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990 [1957]), 28. Refer Chapter 4, note 27 for the table.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thomas-Fogiel, I. (2014). Fichte and the Contemporary Transcendental Arguments Debate. In: Rockmore, T., Breazeale, D. (eds) Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412232_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412232_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48949-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41223-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)