The study of the transcendental principle of the method for understanding presence and reality with special reference Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Kant's critical philosophy was the reaction over the one sided (as Kant says) thinking of the rationalists and empiricists philosophers. A specific kind of methodology is necessary to investigate into knowledge in any field and that is also true about the philosophy. But the problem with philosophy is that the philosophers before Kant had been using the methods of other fields of knowledge to enquire the philosophical problems i.e. rationalists and empiricists used deductive and inductive methods of mathematics and natural sciences respectively. But they could not succeed in their attempts. It was Kant who first time felt the necessity of a methodology different from the empirical methods and he formulated a new method to investigate the peculiar kinds of problems of philosophy which he entitled Critical Method and Transcendental Method. In this chapter our attempt is to explore the transcendental and critical method of Kant. There are three sections in this chapter i.e. The Meaning of Transcendent and Transcendental, Kant's Critical Method and Kant's transcendental Method. In first section our problem of analysis is to differentiate the meanings of the two terms; transcendent and transcendental. Difference between the objects of knowledge, concepts of knowledge and principles of knowledge in Kantian philosophy is based on the difference between these two terms. So we shall try to investigate into this fundamental confusion in the beginning of the chapter. In the second and third section, our topic of analysis is two incorporative methods of Kant. First one is critical method which we shall try to explore in the second section and the other is transcendental method which is the subject matter of third section. These both methods are two faces of one coin so interrelated to each other but for the clarity of understanding we shall enquire them differently so that the true spirit of Kantian methodology could be retained. But firstly we need to understand the different meanings of the two fundamental terms of Kantian philosophy; transcendent and transcendental.