HERMANN COHEN’S TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD AS A PROJECT (II)
The article “Discourse on the Transcendental Method” brings a wider perspective on the method than one kept by that prolegomenous (see Part I). The task of consideration of fundamental mathematical physics from the transcendental point of view, which was originally set by Cohen, is all the more vital today when physical science has been passing through methodological crisis. This latter is because of the fact that, at the present time, empirical methodology is notably insufficient on the frontiers of physics, though it had been extremely successful for centuries before. Such a consideration is to begin with only a change in attitude: intentio recta should be replaced with intentio obliqua. The subject-object identity thematized in the nature of the transcendental method must, on the part of what follows that identity, imply that the method, unlike theories, is being formed through reflections upon and along the lines of methodical patterns in physico-mathematical knowledge when validating their structural constituents by exposing the a priori origination these suggest. As the method of justification for the a priori in mathematics and physics, it had also emerged in Kantʼs theoretical philosophy as an effect of reflections upon Newtonʼs Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. However, it should have a form that refers to the methodical form of todayʼs fundamental physico-mathematical knowledge. In that respect, unlike theories, it should be a method both in its form and in its content, i.e. a pure method. Reinterpreting the universal constituents of methodical patterns of theories within the context of the transcendental method to be formed presupposes elimination from here of all that is of unmethodical, constitutive significance. And in so doing one comes to clearing up the method itself. The critical attitude of philosophy toward science has been transient to have become the intellectual intuition at “the unity of reason” ( Vernunfteinheit ) as a method, as Kant had called it, that has also been put as the limit of all the clearings-up, and as the common goal for both philosophy and science. The intellectual intuition is thus the transcendental method in nuce. In this primordial sense the latter has a dialectical character featured for the first time, as to its ontological ground, in the Platonian Sophista. Its dialectical inwardness as the “origin” is responsible for its self-determination through the deductive mathematical structure that recurs in a number of replicas as one remaining a theoretic invariant - despite any alterations in the circumstances of oneʼs constitutive use in the theories.