Transcendental

Transcendental (from Latin transcendere, to surpass) — A term with two historical strata of meaning that must be distinguished. In medieval scholasticism, the transcendentalia were properties that transcend Aristotle’s categories and can be predicated of every being as being — ens (being), unum (one), verum (true), and bonum (good); being more general than any category, they form no genus, a doctrine systematized by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The modern technical sense, however, is fixed by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787): transcendental designates not what lies beyond experience but its conditions of possibility — the a priori knowledge that makes the knowledge of objects possible in advance. Hence the decisive and frequently confused distinction between transcendental and transcendent: the latter names what surpasses all possible experience (God, the soul, the world as a totality), whereas the transcendental is immanent to the domain of experience. Thus the Transcendental Aesthetic presents space and time as pure forms of sensibility, and the Transcendental Analytic sets out the categories (causality, substance) as pure concepts of the understanding — both conditions of all objective experience. Edmund Husserl reappropriates the term in his transcendental phenomenology, in which the epoché (phenomenological reduction) reveals consciousness as the constitutive instance of all meaning; meanwhile the transcendental arguments of analytic philosophy (P. F. Strawson, Individuals, 1959) revive the Kantian strategy, inferring from an indisputable premise the conditions that make it possible, against scepticism.

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