Transcendentalism

Abstract

9.1 Kant’s correspondence theory: the sensitive nature of cognitions that must be assumed—Space and time as fundamental intuitions—Our spatial and temporal representations do not come about by the sum of the different spaces and times we experience: their apriority—Why this does not mean, for Kant, to advance any metaphysical thesis. 9.2 The aprioristic character of our “predicaments”—Between innatism and empiricism: the acquisition of pure concepts—Their difference regarding object-concepts and relation-concepts, which aposterioristically belong to the empirical world—Kant and the particular function of modality within the judicative and categorical scheme—Classes of judgments and categories—The threefold arrangement of modal predication: arbitrariness, necessity and the middle way offered by assertoriness—Fragility of the latter even if the assertive content remains unaltered. 9.3 Kant’s reassessment of the matter in terms of our “holding for true”: its three modes—The overarching processes of “opining”, “believing” and “knowing”—Spheres of belief—The modes of taking to be true as correlative to the modes of predicating—Certainty and uncertainty as instances of necessity and contingency, respectively—Scientific versus doxastic and credential ascriptions—The twofold structure of certainty: “rational” and “empirical”—How the latter divides itself into “immediate” and “mediate”, possessing but an “assertoric” force—Truth viewed from an aletheic and an anthropological perspective—Why, for Bolzano, acts of knowing should be excluded from holding true as long as this involves confident beliefs—Unconfident beliefs constitute no more than opinions—The weaknesses of transcendentalism: Greco on transcendental arguments.