(Kant);
 Much of transcendental thinking comes from German idealism and the writings of Immanuel Kant.
 philosophy emphasizing reasoning: a system of philosophy, especially that of Kant, that regards the processes of reasoning as the key to knowledge of reality
KANT AND THE SOLUTION
Kant starts by saying that all our knowledge begins with experience as it gives us "the raw material of our sense impressions." He therefore is in agreement with the empiricists. Saying that all knowledge begins with experience does not mean it all originates from experience. It must also be taken into account the contribution the mind makes to its knowledge of things, for it is an active participant in organizing and imposing form on the material it experiences.
The answer lied in assimilating both ideas. Any knowledge that we might possess or wish to express would need to be presented as statements whose truth or falsity could be evaluated. These he called propositions or judgments. They contain a subject, what is talked about, and a predicate, what is said about the subject. We have four types of these:
1. a priori - judgments we know are true apart from experience. They have universality and necessity, and are true everywhere at all times. An example is 5+2=7.
2. a posterior - derivable with the assistance of sense experience. For example, the sky is blue.
3. analytic - propositions in which the predicate is stated in the subject. An example is: A bachelor is an unmarried male; the predicate adds nothing to the subject.
4. synthetic - predicate is not identical with the subject. It tells us something new. For example, The house is burning.
From these four listed above, two distinctions may be inferred:
1. analytic a priori - statements that are universally true but are uninformative. For an example, A is A. A bald headed man is one who has no hair on his head.
2. synthetic a posteriori - one in which an empirical observation is recorded. It is informative but lacks universality and necessity. For example: "The grass is green." People in Arctic regions may never have seen grass.
These two propositions were the only two kinds we can have, as David Hume assumed, although he called them by different names. For example a priori propositions are relations of ideas in his system and tell us only about the interconnectedness of our ideas and do not increase our knowledge. Synthetic a posterior propositions are matters of fact in Hume's system and summarize what we have observed and cannot serve as predictions of future experience.
Kant, upon considering Hume's terms, now broached a third type of proposition, called a synthetic a priori proposition. This would be valuable since it would be universally true and, having important content to it, could serve as a premise for predictions about areas of natural events not yet observed or observable. The problem with this third type is in the synthetic element, being that the subject and predicate are two distinct notions. How can we say that they are necessarily connected in some way, so that "S is P' is true always. It doesn't arise for synthetic propositions but for synthetic a priori ones. Would we automatically assume that every time the subject "house" is mentioned the predicate "is burning" will follow?
Hume saw this problem limited to causation and it could be solved by denying its existence. The causal axiom is synthetic and they rest on experience so we cannot be sure of its universality. Kant, although believed the causal axiom was not an a posteriori, but an a priori truth, thereby making all events subject to it. He also realized Hume's concern was not limited to causation. The problem, as Kant saw it, was much wider and the causal axiom was an example of it. He realized that the true question was if we could really have this type of knowledge.
Kant set out in the last three sections of the Critique to prove this:
• Transcendental Aesthetic - deals with the faculty of sensibility and demonstrates how synthetic a priori propositions are possible in math.
• Transcendental Analytic - deals with the faculty of understanding and shows how these principles are possible in natural science.
• Transcendental Dialectic - deals with the faculty of reason and shows how and why these propositions offered by it and claims made by traditional metaphysics are possible.

Intuitionism (Bergsonl)
Intuition: the ability to know something by using your feelings rather than considering the facts
Opposite to the mathematics.
Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)
The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) developed his own version of Intuitionism in his "An Introduction to Metaphysics". He held that there are two distinct ways in which an object can be known:

1-absolutely-knowledge can be gained by intuition
2-relatively-knowledge can be gained by analysis

IV. Ontology: Idealism (Plato, Berkeley); Representative Realism (Locke); Materialism (Marx)

Ontology
a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existenc

Introduction
This new perspective on the overall direction of our growing universe provides a new context for understanding the specific nature of our existence - the Science of Being. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that investigates the nature of being and of the first principles, or categories such as Cosmology. Cosmology concerns itself with the origins and general structure of the universe, its parts, elements, and laws, especially with regard to such characteristics as space, time, causality, and synchronicity. the fact of two or more things happening at exactly the same time
Ontology is sometimes considered to be synonymous with metaphysics, but is that part of metaphysics that specifies the most fundamental categories of existence, the elementary substances or structures out of which the world is made. Ontology will thus analyse the most general and abstract concepts or distinctions that underlie every more specific description of any phenomenon in the world, e.g. time, space, matter, process, cause and effect, system.

Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to entities. Other philosophers contend that some nouns do not name entities but provide a kind of shorthand way of referring to a collection (of either objects or events). In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations
Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality


Fundamental Questions of Ontology
"What can be said to exist?"
"What is a thing?"
"Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?"
"What are the meanings of being?"
"What are the various modes of being of entities?"

Concepts
Essential ontological dichotomies(diff of 2 thing) include:
universals and particulars
substance and accident
abstract and concrete objects
essence and existence
determinism and indeterminism
monism and dualism
idealism and materialism

Origin
Parmenides and monism
Body and environment, questioning the meaning of being
Ontology and language (what is?)
Ontology and human geography (subjective & objective)
Reality and actuality (diff)
Microcosmic ontology (atom example, can’t know the true reality of such tiny objects)

Subject, Relationship, Object
"What exists", "What is", "What am I", "What is describing this to me", all exemplify questions about being, and highlight the most basic problems in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about.
During the Enlightenment the view of Rene Descartes that "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") had generally prevailed, although Descartes himself did not believe the question worthy of any deep investigation. However, Descartes was very religious in his philosophy, and indeed argued that "cogito ergo sum" proved the existence of God. Later theorists would note the existence of the "Cartesian Other" - asking "who is reading that sentence about thinking and being?" - and generally concluded that it must be God.
This answer, however, became increasingly unsatisfactory in the 20th century as the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and even particle physics explored some of the most fundamental barriers to knowledge about being. Sociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other," the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. The Cartesian Other was also used by Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract


Body and Environment
Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings - as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive science.
The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define. What did people mean when they said "A is B", "A must be B", "A was B"...? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language, leaving "E Prime", supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger attempted to distinguish being and existence.

Becoming
The first formal development of this notion within philosophy began with the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, where he posited agon ("strife of opposites") as the ontological basis of all reality in terms of this endless transformative conflict, which was later contrasted and dominated by the Parmenidean, or Platonic, notion of Being, until more recent philosophers began a reversion of this trend.
Notably and the first to make such an advocation since Heraclitus was the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the expression "the innocence of becoming", a fundamental element of his philosophical thought grounded in the "will to power as pathos", as a means to describe the aesthetic qualities of existence, which pervades his thinking, including but not limited to ideas such as his "Dionysian world", "eternal recurrence", "amor fati", and "decadence". It was with this a-teleological view that he attempted to disgregate all views pertaining to the human condition, where "thingness" is ultimately characterized as a mere "hypothesis" in Nietzsche's phrase, and such a view, pertaining to the "inequality" of all "things", carries deep implications for ethics and the nature of knowledge.

Social Science
Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches: realism (the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered), empiricism (the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts), positivism (which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves), and postmodernism (which holds that facts are fluid and elusive difficult to find, define or achieve, so that we should focus only on our observational claims).

Idealism
The philosophical theory that ideas are the only reality.

Idealism is the metaphysical and epistemological doctrine that ideas or thoughts make up fundamental reality. Essentially, it is any philosophy which argues that the only thing actually knowable is consciousness (or the contents of consciousness), whereas we never can be sure that matter or anything in the outside world really exists. Thus, the only real things are mental entities, not physical things (which exist only in the sense that they are perceived).

Idealism is a form of Monism (as opposed to Dualism or Pluralism), and stands in direct contrast to other Monist beliefs such as Physicalism and Materialism (which hold that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is physical matter). It is also contrasted with Realism (which holds that things have an absolute existence prior to, and independent of, our knowledge or perceptions).

Platonic Idealism
 Philosophy of “form”, think of a chair and chair appears in the mind exactly.
 Plato’s ideal form of govt, republic, state, communism, etc
 Plato is one of the first philosophers to discuss what might be termed Idealism, although his Platonic Idealism is, confusingly, usually referred to as Platonic Realism. This is because, although his doctrine described Forms or universals (which are certainly non-material "ideals" in a broad sense), Plato maintained that these Forms had their own independent existence, which is not an idealist stance, but a realist one. However, it has been argued that Plato believed that "full reality" (as distinct from mere existence) is achieved only through thought, and so he could be described as a non-subjective, "transcendental (going beyond the limits of human knowledge, experience or reason, especially in a religious or spiritual way)" idealist, somewhat like Kant.
 The Neo-Platonist Plotinus came close to an early exposition of Idealism in the contentions in his "Enneads" that "the only space or place of the world is the soul", and that "time must not be assumed to exist outside the soul". However, his doctrine was not fully-realized, and he made no attempt to discover how we can get beyond our ideas in order to know external objects.

Berkeley’s Idealism
 Bishop George Berkeley is sometimes known as the "Father of Idealism", and he formulated one of the purest forms of Idealism in the early 18th Century.
 He argued that our knowledge must be based on our perceptions and that there was indeed no "real" knowable object behind one's perception (in effect, that what was "real" was the perception itself). He explained how it is that each of us apparently has much the same sort of perceptions of an object, by bringing in God as the immediate cause of all of our perceptions.
 Berkeley's version of Idealism is usually referred to as Subjective Idealism or Dogmatic Idealism.

Representative Realism
 What we perceive or see in the real world is actually not real. It is our ideas and own knowing things in our own way due to the veil of perception.

Explanation
 Representationalism (also known as Representative Realism or Indirect Realism or Epistemological Dualism or the Representative Theory of Perception) is the philosophical position that the world we see in conscious experience is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica/copycat of that world in an internal representation. Thus, we know only our ideas or interpretations of objects in the world, because a barrier (or veil of perception) between the mind and the existing world prevents first-hand knowledge of anything beyond it.

 Unlike Idealism, Representationalism holds that our ideas come from sense data (or images) of a real, material, external world(Realism), but that the immediate (direct) object of perception is only sense data that represents the external object. It approaches perception from a similiar point of view to Phenomenalism. It also entails a type of Dualism, such as that of Descartes.

History of Realism
 Aristotle, in his work "On the Soul", was the first to describe how the eye must be affected by changes in an intervening medium rather than by objects themselves, and he reasons that, in order to avoid an infinite regress (to go back to an earlier, less advanced state), the senses themselves must be self-aware.

Locke’s Representative Realism
 The 17th Century philosopher John Locke was the most prominent advocate of this theory.
 He asserted that there are primary qualities which are "explanatorily basic" in that they can be referred to as the explanation for other qualities or phenomena without requiring explanation themselves (similar to the concept of Foundationalism), and that these qualities are distinct in that our sensory experience of them resembles them in reality.
 Secondary qualities (including colour, smell and taste) are those which one's experience does not directly resemble.

Criticisms of Representationalism
 Skeptics object that, since we only have knowledge of the representations of our perceptions, how is it possible to know for sure that they resemble in any significant way the objects to which they are supposed to correspond?
 If perception involves "pictures in your head", then who is it that is viewing those pictures (a homunculus?), and would it not result in an infinite regress of observers within observers?
 How can this theory be consistent with neurophysiology which presents the brain as an assembly of billions of discrete quasi-independent local processors interconnected in a massively parallel network?
 Even if there is a spatial representation in the brain, why (and how) should it be conscious of itself?

Materialism
Oxford: the belief that money, possessions and physical comforts are more important than spiritual values.
 Materalism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter. Thus, according to Materialism, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions, with no accounting of spirit or consciousness. As well as a general concept in Metaphysics, it is more specifically applied to the mind-body problem in Philosophy of Mind.
 In common use, the word "materialist" refers to a person for whom collecting material goods is an important priority, or who primarily pursues wealth and luxury or otherwise displays conspicuous consumption. This can be more accurately termed Economic Materialism.
 With its insistence on a single basic substance, it is a type of Monism (as opposed to Dualism or Pluralism), and it can be also considered a variety of Naturalism (the belief that nature is all exists, and that all things supernatural therefore do not exist). It stands (like the related concept of Physicalism) in contrast to Idealism (also known as Immaterialism) and Solipsism. Physicalism, however, has evolved with the physical sciences to incorporate farmore sophisticated notions of physicality than just matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces produced by particles.

Marx’s Materialism/Types of Materialism
 Dialectical Materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism and Communism.
 The term, which was never actually used by Marx himself, refers to the notion of a synthesis of Hegel's theory of Dialectics (the concept that any idea or event - the thesis - generates its opposite - the antithesis - eventually leading to a reconciliation of opposites - a new, more advanced synthesis) and Materialism (in the respect that Dialectics could also be applied to material matters like economics).
The application of the principle of Dialectical Materialism to history and sociology, the main context in which Marx used it, is known as Historical Materialism (see below).
 Historical Materialism (or the "materialist conception of history") is the Marxist methodological approach to the study of society, economics and history which was first articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895), and has been expanded and refined by many academic studies since. It is essentially the application of the principle of Dialectical Materialism (see above) to history and sociology.
According to Marx, for human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and this production is carried out through a division of labour based on very definite production relations between people. These relations form the economic base of society, and are themselves determined by the mode of production which is in force (e.g. tribal society, ancient society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism), and societies, and their cultural and institutional superstructures, naturally move from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class in a social and political upheaval. a big change that causes a lot of confusion, worry and problems
Although Marx himself said that he was only proposing a guideline for historical research, by the 20th Century the concept of Historical Materialism had become a keystone of modern Communist doctrine.