Kant's influence on the history of philosophy is vast and protean. The transcendental turn denotes one of its most important forms, defined by the notion that Kant's deepest insight should not be identified with any specific epistemological or metaphysical doctrine, but rather concerns the fundamental standpoint and terms of reference of philosophical enquiry. To take the transcendental turn is not to endorse any of Kant's specific teachings, but to accept that the Copernican revolution announced in the Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason sets philosophy on a new footing and constitutes the proper starting point of philosophical reflection. The aim of this volume is to map the historical trajectory of transcendental philosophy and the major forms that it has taken. The contributions, from leading contemporary scholars, focus on the question of what the transcendental turn consists in--its motivation, justification, and implications; and the limitations and problems which it arguably confronts--with reference to the relevant major figures in modern philosophy, including Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. Central themes and topics discussed include the distinction of realism from idealism, the relation of transcendental to absolute idealism, the question of how transcendental conclusions stand in relation to (and whether they can be made compatible with) naturalism, the application of transcendental thought to foundational issues in ethics, and the problematic relation of phenomenology to transcendental enquiry.

Heidegger’s Shadow is an important contribution to the understanding of Heidegger’s ambivalent relation to transcendental philosophy. Its contention is that Heidegger recognizes the importance of transcendental philosophy as the necessary point of entry to his thought, but he nonetheless comes to regard it as something that he must strive to overcome even though he knows such an attempt can never succeed. Engelland thoroughly engages with major texts such as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Being and Time, and Contributions and traces the progression of Heidegger’s readings of Kant and Husserl to show that Heidegger cannot abandon his own earlier breakthrough work in transcendental philosophy. This book will be of interest to those working on phenomenology, continental philosophy, and transcendental philosophy.

The principal differences between the contemporary philosophic traditions which have come to be known loosely as analytic philosophy and phenomenology are all related to the central issue of the interplay between predication and perception. Frege's critique of psychologism has led to the conviction within the analytic tradition that philosophy may best defend rationality from relativism by detaching logic and semantics from all dependence on subjective intuitions. On this interpretation, logical analysis must account for the relationship of sense to reference without having recourse to a description of how we identify particulars through their perceived features. Husserl' s emphasis on the priority and objective import of perception, and on the continuity between predicative articulations and perceptual discriminations, has yielded the conviction within the phenomenological tradition that logical analysis should always be comple mented by description of pre-predicative intuitions. These methodological differences are related to broader differences in the philosophic projects of analysis and phenomenology. The two traditions have adopted markedly divergent positions in reaction to the critique of ancient and medieval philosophy initiated by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes at the beginning of the modern era. The analytic approach generally endorses the modern preference for calculative rationality and remains suspicious of pre-modern categories, such as formal causality and eidetic intuition. Its goal is to give an account of human intelligence that is compatible with the modern interpretation of nature as an ensemble of quantifiable entities and relations.

The transcendental turn of Husserl’s phenomenology has challenged philosophers and scholars from the beginning. This volume inquires into the profound meaning of this turn by contrasting its Kantian and its phenomenological versions. Examining controversies surrounding subjectivity, idealism, aesthetics, logic, the foundation of sciences, and practical philosophy, the chapters provide a helpful guide for facing current debates.

Beth Lord looks at Kant's philosophy in relation to four thinkers who attempted to fuse transcendental idealism with Spinoza's doctrine of immanence. Examining Jacobi, Herder, Maimon and Deleuze, Lord argues that Spinozism is central to the development of Kant's thought, and opens new avenues for understanding Kant's relation to Deleuze.

Transcendental Ontology in German Idealism: Schelling and Hegel sheds remarkable light on a question central to post-Kantian philosophy: after the Copernican Revolution in philosophy, what can philosophy say about the world or reality as such? What remains of ontology's task after Kant? This is a question often overlooked in contemporary scholarship on German Idealism. Markus Gabriel offers a refreshing reinvigoration of a range of questions concerning scepticism, corporeality, freedom, the question of being, the absolute and the modal status of our determinations and judgments, all crucial to our understanding of the truly radical nature of post-Kantian philosophy. Gabriel's assessment of the experiments undertaken in post-Kantian ontology reaffirms Schelling's and Hegel's place at the heart of contemporary metaphysics. The book shows how far we still have to go in mining the thought of Hegel and Schelling and how exciting, as a result, we can expect twenty-first century philosophy to be.

Dan Zahavi offers an in-depth and up-to-date analysis of central and contested aspects of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. What is ultimately at stake in Husserl's phenomenological analyses? Are they primarily to be understood as investigations of consciousness or are they equally about the world? What is distinctive about phenomenological transcendental philosophy, and what kind of metaphysical import, if any, might it have? Husserl's Legacy offers an interpretation of the more overarching aims and ambitions of Husserlian phenomenology and engages with some of the most contested and debated questions in phenomenology. Central to its interpretative efforts is the attempt to understand Husserl's transcendental idealism. Zahavi argues that Husserl was not a sophisticated introspectionist, not a phenomenalist, nor an internalist, not a quietist when it comes to metaphysical issues, and not opposed to all forms of naturalism. Husserl's Legacy argues that Husserl's phenomenology is as much about the world as it is about consciousness, and that a proper grasp of Husserl's transcendental idealism reveals the fundamental importance of facticity and intersubjectivity.