"Transcendental Philosophy: its History and Nature," Annual Conference, BSHP, Manchester Metropolitan University, April 14-17, 2009.

Thinking about the notion of the “transcendental” in the history of philosophy touches on a number of distinct topics that have proved of central significance. These include the understanding of the a priori, the nature of necessity claims in experience, the questions of the nature of experience itself and its possibility, and the understanding of what is essential in claims of knowledge. Whilst transcendental philosophy as a venture has tended in recent years to be identified with the Kantian project, it is not exclusively connected to it, since successors to Kant have contested the understanding and significance of the “transcendental”. Included amongst alternatives to the Kantian conception are those of the German Idealists (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), all of whom have either described themselves or been described by others as transcendental philosophers. Similarly,the revival of interest in Kant in the late nineteenth-century, produced significant revisions in the understanding of transcendental methods and arguments. The traditions of European philosophy include significant reinventions of the concept of the transcendental in the works of Husserl, Derrida and Deleuze and the analytic tradition includes such transcendental projects as those of Wilfred Sellars and Peter Strawson and Charles Pierce provides an additional example of an arguably transcendental philosophy. By contrast, in considering the place of the concept of the transcendental in philosophy, it is also important to consider its usage prior to the work of Kant in, for example, the medieval tradition of describing the transcendentals or Plotinus’conception of the transcendental. In responding to this topic contributors might focus, inter alia, on any of the following: Transcendental philosophy: its nature and scope; Transcendental arguments; the nature of transcendental idealism; the viability of transcendental realism; transcendental phenomenology; the role of the transcendentals in medieval philosophy; transcendental empiricism; transcendental philosophy and metaphysics; the synthetic a priori; transcendental deductions; transcendental psychology; analytic philosophy and the transcendental; the intuition of essences; categorial intuition; transcendental subjectivity; science and experience; transcendental apperception; transcendental imagination; transcendental logic; the logic of experience; transcendental ontology; transcendental pragmatism; semiotics and the transcendental; transcendental dynamics; mathematics and experience; nature and the world; mind and world; transcendental aesthetics; transcendental dialectics; transcendental methods. Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words, by December 31st, to the following: Gary Banham [g.banham@mmu.ac.uk] and James Clarke [jac505@york.ac.uk].