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chaptEr 8 From transcEndEntal to transcEndEntal i In the second edition (1787) of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in the Transcendental Analytic, just after the Table of Categories and just before his Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) added a section (Abschnitt § 12, B 113-14) that marked at once the deficiency of an older Scholastic doctrine of transcendentals and yet in it arguably an adumbration of his own doctrine .1 He expressed his core thought thus: In the transcendental philosophy of the ancients there is included yet another chapter containing pure concepts of the understanding which, though not enumerated among the categories, must, on their view, be ranked as a priori concepts of objects. … They are propounded in the proposition, so famous among the Schoolmen, quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum. … These supposedly transcendental predicates of things are in fact, nothing but logical requirements and criteria of all knowledge of things in general, and prescribe for such knowledge the categories of quantity, namely, unity, plurality, and totality.2 Among later commentators, the setting of Kant’s Abschnitt within the Kritik, as well as the wider question of a link between Kantian transcendentals and earlier teaching, have gained some attention. Thus, near the turn of the twentieth * This essay was originally published as “Between Transcendental and Transcendental: The Missing Link?,” The Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997): 783-815. 1 To one well known commentator this section seems to be “of no intrinsic importance ;” cf. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 2nd edition, revised and enlarged (Atlantic Highland, Nj: Humanities Press International, 1992), 200. 2 “Es findet sich aber in der Transzendentalphilosophie der Alten noch ein Hauptstück vor, welches reine Verstandesbegriffe enthält, die, ob sie gleich nicht unter die Kategorien gezählt werden, dennoch, nach ihnen, als Begriffe a priori von Gegenständen gelten sollten , … Diese trägt der unter den Scholastikern so berufene Satz vor: quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum. … Diese vermeintlich transzendentale Prädikate der Dinge sind nichts anders als logische Erfordernisse und Kriterien aller Erkenntnis der Dinge überhaupt , und legen ihr die Kategorien der Quantität, nämlich der Einheit, Vielheit und Allheit zum Grunde, …” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 113-14, in Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, III [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 1968], 123-24, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, reprint of second impression [London: Macmillan, 1958], 118). * 186 ChAptEr 8 century, relying particularly on earlier work of Benno Erdmann,3 Hans Leisegang showed both some continuity of the Scholastic doctrine with Kant’s pre-critical teaching and a possible anticipation in that doctrine of the structure of the Kritik itself.4 As Leisegang saw it, the Scholastic transcendentals had been taken over successively by Christian Wolff (1679-1754) in his Ontologia and then by Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), whose Metaphysica was at the base of Kant’s pre-critical lectures on metaphysics.5 It was then Baumgarten’s divisions of metaphysics, themselves taken from Wolff, which were transformed into the architectonic of Kant’s critical philosophy.6 “Transcendental,” says Leisegang, was one of the those terms which Kant borrowed from the vocabulary of earlier philosophy and then changed for his own purposes.7 The earlier vocabulary was reflected in Baumgarten’s conception of ontology or metaphysics as “the science of the general predicates of being.”8 Leisegang correctly, I believe, observes that Baumgarten’s understanding of such predicates itself reflected medieval doctrine, especially that of Duns Scotus (12661308 ).9 Leisegang has further noted Kant’s initial high regard for Baumgarten’s 3 See esp.: “Die Entwicklungsperioden von Kants theoretischer Philosophie,” in Reflexionen Kants zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Reflexionen Kants zur kritischen Philosophie, II, aus Kants handschriftlichen Aufzeichnungen), ed. Benno Erdmann (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1884), xiii-lx. 4 Cf. Hans Leisegang, “Über die Bedeutung des scholastischen Satzes: ‘Quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum’ und seine Bedeutung in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” Kant-Studien 20.4 (1915): 403-21. 5 Cf. “Die Transzendentalia der Scholastik (oder auch die Transzendentia) werden dann in der Wolffsche Ontologie, die den ersten Teil seiner Metaphysik bildet, übernommen, und so finden wir sie auch in dem Baumgartenschen Handbuch wieder, das Kant seinen Vorlesungen über Metaphysik zu Grunde legte” (ibid., 406). For Baumgarten, see Metaphysica Alexandri Baumgarten professoris philosophiae, ed. vii (Halae Magdeburgicae: Impensis Carol. Herman. Hemmerde, 1779 [first edition: 1739]; repr. Hildesheim...

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