Transcendental philosophy and naturalism

notes and thoughts on philosophy

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September 15th, 2006 by notebooker

I’ve just got an email through confirming my place for this conference in a couple of weeks, which looks very interesting. This project is being run by Essex University and looks like it may produce some useful clarification of the transcendental / naturalism debate, thoguh I’ve been too busy this year to pay it as much attention as I would have liked. Take a look at the speaker list and subject titles though if Kant, transcendental arguments or the naturalism debate are in your horizon and email them if you want to attend. Details on the website linked.

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2 Responses

Phil writes:
October 4th, 20065:39 amat

Two things: Firstly where could I find work on transcendental / naturalism that explains the contemporary stance – a kind of quick guide to the issues involved. Also, just a remark, the wording next to the entry boxes for name, email, etc is quite dark – I’m not sure how bright you have your monitor but I have always found the less glare the more you can stare – maybe you could turn your brightness down to see what I mean or maybe you have some pukka screen so maybe you should access the site from a lesser monitor. Apart from that it all looks very proffesional and Im sure it took a while to get it right – very earthy – just like your teaching style :-)
notebooker writes:
October 6th, 20065:13 pmat

As for the website, yes, there’ll be a bit of fine-tuning as we go along, not least because I work on a linux system at home so use firefox and have other differences – this means I’ll be using the pc’s at work to do some ‘cross-platform’ checking and since they’ve given me a crappy old computer since I’m the new boy in the department that means I’ll have plenty of time to check the site with a low end windows machine ;-)

Regarding the transcendental philosophy / naturalism divide – as I mentioned in the email, you might also find some distinction between a normative and naturalist type or argument (or ‘stance’, a term that comes from Bas Van Fraasen’s book ‘The empirical stance’). I’m not sure there’s a simple location for an introduction to this debate as it’s not, in some ways, a direct debate. By that I mean, it’s not a debate in which two or more people engage in the same conversation – what I mean to refer to when I use that notion is a broad divide of approach (or stance) within philosophy, such that we can crudely say that there’s these two positions people argue for or argue within or – more commmonly – try to reconcile through something they might call a ‘transcendental naturalism’ or a ‘normative naturalism’. Of course that might sound like there’s no real divide, until you remember that the reason people need to argue for sucha thing as, say, normative naturalism is that there seems to be a prima facie incompatbility between transcendental structures and naturalistic ones.

We’d probably need to get more specific if we were to get much further than these broad comments and I will dig around and see if I can find a good example of how the difference might be said to operate and what relevance it might have.

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