Kant's Notion Of Transcendental Cognition

An Explanation of Kant’s Notion of Transcendental Cognition

Introduction

While ‘transcendental’ has already been a philosophical term since medieval times, the notion of transcendental cognition along with that of transcendental philosophy was first advanced by Kant. Despite the fact that this notion was directly employed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason for merely several times; it plays, as I will argue later, a central role in transcendental philosophy. Therefore, the explanation of this notion would contribute greatly to our understanding of transcendental philosophy.

Nevertheless, little effort has been made to introduce and expound this very notion specially, notwithstanding the great amount of scholarly literature of Kant. In

As is mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the philosophical concept of transcendental first appeared far earlier than Kant’s time and dates back to medieval times, during which it was a central issue among scholastics. This scholastic term in its traditional usage is about the universal predicates that apply to every being or is about the general attributes of being, such as ‘being’, ‘one’, ‘true’ and ‘good’. This traditional usage is, to a limited degree, inherited by Kant through his predecessors like Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten; in most cases in the Critique as well as in the very notion of transcendental cognition, the concept of transcendental is nevertheless employed in a different and original fashion. The concept in this new usage concerns with a priori mode of cognition of things rather than with things

On this account, it differs firstly from empirical cognition and then from first order a priori cognition. This twofold distinction is to be discussed successively as follows:

(1) Belonging among a priori cognitions, transcendental cognition is in contrast to empirical cognition. The basic division of cognition into a priori and empirical is made in accordance with its source. According to Kant, whereas all human cognitions begin with experience, not all of them arise from experience. That is, although none of them, as far as time is concerned, precedes the affection of objects; some, as far as source is concerned, occur absolutely independently of all experience and are thereby called a priori cognitions. In contrast, those originated from experience are empirical cognitions. On this account, the former have strict universality and apodictic necessity as their secure indications; the latter, on the contrary, have merely limited and comparative universality and necessity, which are gained through induction. Therefore, in contrast to empirical cognition, transcendental cognition as a priori cognition originates independently of all experience and thereby has strict necessity and universality. This is in fact the general distinction between apriority and