The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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So far as I can tell, I have not argued for the necessity of "transcendental arguments" in anything like the specific sense in which Gamwell, for one, understands them, even if I have sometimes spoken of something much more general that I called "transcendental method."

Thus, for example, in speaking at one point of "the essential structure of metaphysical inquiry," I said "It invariably involves the most basic and comprehensive questions that can occur to the human mind, and the procedure it follows in answering these questions always involves some form or other of the transcendental method, by which I mean simply the raising to full self-consciousness of the basic beliefs that are the necessary conditions of the possibility of our existing or understanding at all" (OT: 77).

Compare with this what Gamwell says by way of defining "transcendental argument": "By 'transcendental argument,'" he says, "I mean the attempt to show that some understanding is affirmed, at least implicitly, by every subject who understands anything at all, so that every possible subject who denies the understanding in question commits a performative or pragmatic contradiction, because every possible act of denial implies an affirmation of precisely what is denied" (JR, 82, 3 [July 2002]: 362).

14 December 2002

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