and the doctrine of formal implication for its equipment. Unless the
doctrine of Kant's "transcendental logic" must be held to supply a point
of view from which a logical development of quite another kind is
inevitable, Kant's mantle, so far as logic is concerned, must be
regarded as having fallen upon the formal logicians.
Definition of "Transcendental."
Kant's transcendental teaching is summarily as follows: "Transcendental"
is his epithet for what is neither empirical--i.e. to be derived from
experience--nor yet transcendent--i.e. applicable beyond the limits of
experience, the mark of experience being the implication of sense or of
something which thought contra-distinguishes from its own spontaneous
activity as in some sense "the given." Those features in our organized
experience are to be regarded as transcendentally established which are
the presuppositions of our having that experience at all. Since they are
not empirical they must be structural and belong to "the mind"--i.e. the
normal human intelligence, and to like intelligence so far as like. If
we set aside such transcendental conditions as belong to sensibility or
to the receptive phase of mind and are the presuppositions of
juxtaposition of parts, the remainder are ascribable to spontaneity or
understanding, to thought with its unifying, organizing or focussing
function, and their elucidation is the problem of transcendental
analytic. It is still logic, indeed, when we are occupied with the
transcendent objects of the discursive faculty as it is employed beyond
the limits of experience where it cannot validate its ideas. Such a
logic, however, is a dialectic of illusion, perplexed by paralogisms and
helpless in the face of antinomies. In transcendental analytic on the
other hand we concern ourselves only with the transcendental "deduction"
or vindication of the conditions of experience, and we have a logic of
cognition in which we may establish our epistemological categories with
complete validity. Categories are the forms according to which the
combining unity of self-consciousness (synthetic unity of apperception)
pluralizes itself through the various functions involved in the
constitution of objectivity in different types of the one act of
thought, viz. judgment. The clue to the discovery of transcendental
conditions Kant finds in the existence of judgments, most manifest in
mathematics and in the pure science of nature, which are certain, yet
not trifling, necessary and yet not reducible to identities, synthetic
therefore and a priori, and so accounted for neither by Locke nor by
Leibnitz. "There lies a transcendental condition at the basis of every
necessity."
Form of Matter of Thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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