This book provides a close examination of Kant’s and Fichte’s idealisms, as well as the positions of their predecessors and successors, in order to isolate and evaluate various essential elements of transcendental inquiry. The authors examine Kant’s and Fichte’s contributions to transcendental idealism, transcendental arguments as a distinctive form of reasoning, and the metaphysically more ambitious forms of idealism developed by philosophers such as Schelling, Hegel, and Cohen. The book also addresses some of the most acute criticisms levelled against transcendental philosophy and explores more recent developments of the transcendental approach in the form of contemporary discourse ethics, especially as represented by Habermas and Apel. The authors also explore the contributions of a number of other important philosophers, including Husserl, Heidegger, Løgstrup, Peirce, and Putnam.

Editors’ Introduction.- Part I: The Nature of Transcendental Philosophy.- 1. Tom Rockmore (Peking University, China): “Plato and Kantian Transcendental Constructivism” .-2. Robert Stern (University of Sheffield, UK): “Silencing the Sceptic? Can the Appeal to Transcendental Conditions for Thought, Speech or Action Settle Sceptical Concerns?” .- Part II: The Roots of Transcendental Philosophy in Kant and Fichte.- 3.Claude Piché (Université de Montreal, Canada): “Kant and the Conditions of the Possibility of Experience” .- 4. Violetta Waibel (Universität Wien, Austria): “Kant and Fichte on the Transcendental Notion of Freedom” .- 5. Steven Hoeltzel (James Madison University, US): “Transcendental Ontology and the Ethics of Belief in Fichte’s Jena Wissenschafteslehre”.- 6. Benjamin Crowe (University of Utah, US): “Transcendental Philosophy as Therapy of the Mind: Fichte’s ‘Facts of Consciousness’ Lectures”.- Part III: The Development of Transcendental Philosophy.- 7. Halla Kim (Univ of Nebraska, Omaha, US): “How Transcendental is Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism?” .- 8. Yasuyuki Funaba (Osaka University, Japan): “On the Cognitive Theory of Morality by Jürgen Habermas”.- 9. Matthias Kettner (Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany): “Raising Validity Claims for Reasons: The Transcendental Argument in Apelian Discourse Ethics and How It can be Improved”.- 10. Michihito Yoshime (Sophia University, Japan): “Consequences of the Transcendental-Pragmatic Consensus Theory of Truth” .- 11. Yukio Irie (Osaka University, Japan): “An Alternative Transcendental Argument Based on a Question-Answer Contradiction”.- Part IV: Critiques of Transcendental Philosophy.- 12. William Bristow (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, US): “From Transcendental Philosophy to Hegel's Developmental Method”.- 13. Eric Nelson (Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology/Univ. of Massachusetts, Lowell): “Heidegger’s Ambivalence Toward Transcendental Philosophy”.