Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Is contemporary continental European philosophy preparing itself to break with Kant? An attack upon supposedly indestructible structures of knowledge is happening today: finitude of the subject, phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. “Relinquishing the transcendental”: such is the leading project of postcritical thinking in the early twenty-first century as it appears in Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude. Some questions that we thought could never be raised after the Critique of Pure Reason are reappearing with a renewed force: Was Kant genuinely able to deduce categories instead of imposing them, to prove the necessity of nature, to found the difference between “a priori” and “innate”? Should we consider, on the contrary, that the “problem of Hume”—the existence of an irreducible contingency of the world—has never been settled by the Transcendental Deduction? Such a claim implies that we are provided a sufficiently convincing concept of the irregularity of the laws of nature and of the possibility of a totally different world. Does After Finitude elaborate such concepts?

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