Variations of transcendentalism

Nathan Rotenstreich

pp. 171-181

in: Kah-Kyung Cho (ed), Philosophy and science in phenomenological perspective, Berlin, Springer, 1984

Abstract

The transformation from the scholastic understanding of the concept "transcendental" to Kant's version of that concept is an established fact: scholastic philosophy conceived of transcendental predicates (and they differ from the position of the transcendent) as referring to concepts that, in terms of their universality, go beyond or above categories in the Aristotelian sense of that term, pointing to different modi of being. Hence, they were also called praedicamenta. "Transcendentalia" refer not to modi of being but to the being itself, and thus in terms of content amount to the predicates unum, verum, bonum.