Transcendentalism

The subject of transcendentalism and transcendental argumentation generally are a major part of the claims of professional philosophers to a distinct and autonomous, nonempirical, area of inquiry, clearly distinguishable from the natural and social sciences. In the continental European tradition, the term transcendental philosophy covers a wider range of philosophical approaches than just the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, from whom that term originated. Transcendentalism is a systematic way of doing philosophy that includes writers from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Schelling to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the field of hermeneutics. Transcendentalism includes the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the “proto sociology” of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in the 1960s. Transcendentalist scholars described the basic parameters of the historical process, whereby objective social reality comes to be confronted by a human subject. These parameters were held to be nonempirical, universal structures, a priori, rather than a description of any specific society. These structures were said to find expression in human history and were to be given content in empirical inquiries by sociologists into particular, concrete societies. Transcendentalism plays a role in present-day studies of identity, where debate has focused on whether identities are fixed or adaptable. This entry explores the two types of transcendentalism, their criticisms, and their relevance to the study of identity.