On transcendental philosophy

Margaret Chatterjee

pp. 13-23

in: Frank M. Kirkland, Chattopadhyaya (eds), Phenomenology: East and West, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstrakt

In what follows I shall largely draw on Mohanty's The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy ¹ in an attempt primarily to elucidate his mode of reflection and to raise a few questions. The pertinence of the title of his book should not be missed. Ever since the time of Kant the treatment of the transcendental has been bound up with the idea of the possible, more particularly with the possibility of experience as contrasted with the Leibnizian understanding of possibility in terms of conceivability. To ask about the possibility of transcendental philosophy seems to involve an inbuilt regress. One might attempt to cut through this by raising the question of access. In so doing one recalls a much more hoary style of philosophising where the problematic of access to the transcendent is grappled with. It is not for nothing that students sometimes confuse the transcendent and the transcendental for there are even passages in Kant (who, heavens knows, is deadly earnest about the distinction) where the two vocabularies are used almost interchangeably.