HERMANN COHEN’S TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD AS A PROJECT (I)

Abstract

the Platonic tradition ʼ s methodical triad μονή – πρόοδος – ἐπιστροφή , and on the other with the Kantian “pure natural science” as a hyposta- sis sui generis of the method, for both of them prove to be on and about law of experience. The possibility of such twofold correlation comes about through the circumstance that the Kantian transcendental idea can be eventually identified with Plato ʼ s idea. With “deepening” Kant through Plato in such a way, Cohen rids the Kantian “illusion” of the myopia of sensibility and thereby turns the illusion into Plato ʼ s intellectual intuition. As well as the intellectualization of sensibility imports the status of categories to space and time, expanding further all categories to ideas (principles ending in maxims, appearances – in noumena ), it imports also the expansion of the competence of mathematics and pure natural science over all possible experience that is no longer limited by sensibility. By joining speculative elements with mathematics and the observably given, the transcendental method can shape the “secure course of a science” for modern mathematical physics, and can do it even where the possible experience is inaccessibly far from being actualized, experimentally and observably realized.