Skepticism and the Role of Modest Transcendental Claims

Klemens Kappel

doi:10.1515/SATS.2006.83

Abstract

What can modest transcendental claims do against skepticism? In this paper, I examine various anti-skeptical roles for modest transcendental claims suggested by Barry Stroud, Christopher Hookway, and Robert Stern (Stern, On Kant's Response to Hume: The Second Analogy asTranscendental Argument, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999a, Stern, Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999b, Hookway, Modest Transcendental Arguments and Sceptical Doubts: A Reply to Stroud, Oxford University Press, 1999, Stroud, Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, Stroud, The Goal of Transcendental Arguments, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999). I argue that contrary to what these writers suggest, modest transcendental claims do not achieve much. The strategies on offer either (i) fail to identify a clear anti-skeptical role for modest transcendental claims (Stroud), (ii) they do identify such a role, but only on the assumption that we are facing a non-standard skeptical challenge (Hookway), or (iii) the anti-skeptical strategies do successfully engage with standard forms of skeptical challenges, but they work only because of epistemological assumptions that make the transcendental claims largely redundant (Stern).

Skepticism and the Role of Modest Transcendental Claims

Abstract

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