On Transcendental - Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Husserl

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The notion of transcendental assumed, in Aristotle, a metaphysical sense of characterization of attributes, such as, the unity, the true and the bene.

Thomas Aquinas assumed Aristotle’s transcendental attributes and added other two: res and aliquid.

Kant introduced a new sense to the notion of transcendental, relating it to the Copernican Revolution, thus, this notion that, until Kant, was taken in a "formal-logical" sense that fundamented the things in themselves, after Kant, came to constitute the condition a priori of the possibility of something to constitute itself as a phenomenon and object for any subject capable of thought and knowledge, in this way, concepts or categories assumed the value of transcendentals and, because of that, existed, according to Kant, a priori (dispositionally) in each human subject.

The transcendental no longer operated at the fundament of the things in themselves, but, only, at the fundament of the phenomena and respective objects of knowledge for any subject capable of knowing.

Husserl maintained the Kantian sense of the term, but radicalized it by making the reduction to subjectivity (epoché) as the ultimate fundament of the sense and validity of the experience.