Phenomenology: Linguistic or Transcendental?

Bernhard Ritter (ORCiD: 0000-0001-7171-7082) Kant famously proposed that progress in addressing the problems of metaphysics might be possible by assuming that objects must conform to our cognition, rather than the other way around. He initiated a type of reasoning that invokes the idea that cognition has conditions of possibility and used this as a starting point to establish conclusions about the very objects of this cognition. Many analytic philosophers of the 20th century concluded that such arguments come down to either (a) mere connective analysis, the description of connections between our conceptual capacities and beliefs, or (b) must be viewed as inferences to the best explanation which would thereby be pursued within a naturalist framework. In order to explore a more ambitious version of (a), this project examines the resources of Husserls phenomenology. Husserl argued that Kant did not recognize that transcendental subjectivity, on which Kant had relied, is immediately accessible thanks to a novel kind of pure reflection on our consciousness of things. The closeness of this approach to connective analysis prompts the following way of framing the post-Kantian options: If our way of dealing with the conditions of our rela- tion to the world is to be descriptive, or phenomenological, should this phenomenology be linguistic or Husserlian? The first option manifested itself historically, viz. in the work of Wittgenstein, Ryle, or Austin, in a way that was not conceived of as continuous with a transcendental approach but as more deflationist. In the work of Stanley Cavell, however, we find elements of a genealogical account that aims to integrate Wittgen- steins and Austins emphasis on the ordinary into a narrative that ascends via American transcendentalism to Kant. Within just such wider frame of reference, i.e. the fate of apriorist transcendentalism since 1900, this project aims to investigate the foundations of the contrast between transcendental and linguistic phenomenology. Its approach is based on the maxim that to know how, in principle, we can get from one position to the other and why we may want to, is to know how they relate to each other. What is aimed at is a genealogical account that is able to present the relationship of Austin and Husserl, which this project is set to explore, as if linguistic phenomenology had developed out of transcendental phenomenology.