This formed the basis of philosophical thought that inspired transcendental humanist thinking through the amalgamation of logical rationalism and psychological empiricism.
In the world of academia, critiques have engaged in profound discussion and debate around the meaning, relevance and historical context of the philosophical theory.
In philosophy, transcendence refers to an understanding of the mind's innate ability to process sensory evidence,[8] employed as a theoretical perspective to define the structures of being as a framework to analyse the emergence and validation of knowledge.
[14] The book, which theorises about community governed by an agreement that dictates both "moral and political rules of behaviour",[15] begins with a famous phrase that; "Man was/is born free, and everywhere he is in chains".
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is a German philosopher that centred many of his studies and critical philosophy around human autonomy in the causes and origins of knowledge.
[26] Closely aligned with the study of theology, spiritual transcendentalism describes a religious worldview that acknowledges the existence of a Higher Power beyond human capabilities or experience.
[28] Idealism in philosophy is defined by the subjectivity of space and time and concerns the limits of human cognition in its claims to the knowledge of objects.
[29] Philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that space and time, rather than being empirically mediated appearances in themselves, are the "very forms of intuition" in the way people perceive and interpret objects.
[citation needed] Kant distinguishes between that of the phenomenal and noumenal world, in which phenomena are 'appearances', or those that are apparent to the senses, and noumena are 'things in themselves' that exist within the intelligible realm.
[citation needed] Transcendental idealism affirms that the world and objects are real to the conditions of the human faculty and cognition.
[39] Emerging off the back of the Middle Ages, defined by its adherence to religion as the ultimate source of knowledge, Renaissance Humanism saw a rejection of the divine.
[18] Written in response to the intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment Period (1685–1815), the Critique of Pure Reason examines the relationship between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.
[42] Explaining that knowledge is "provided by a transcendental unity of reason and experience",[33] Kant presents a cross section of rationalist and empiricist positions.
[24] In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant dissects the philosophical concept of transcendental idealism through his argument that space, and time are not things in themselves, but are merely formal features of how one may perceive something.
[4][43] Aligned with Nicholas Copernicus' proposal of a heliocentric solar system,[44] Kant's philosophy discerns humans as the originator experience and knowledge[4] – "that the subject doing the knowing constitutes, to a considerable extent, the object".
[4][46] Critics have claimed there is a lack of clarity in its argumentation, suggesting that Kant's "perspectival dualism"[33] was successful only in creating a transcendental psychologism which is considered incapable of solving "largely imaginary"[4] issues.
Strawson states the theory is "completely unintelligible" and dismisses the "imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" as belonging to neither "empirical ..., nor to an analytic philosophy of mind".
The critic considers Darwinism as the alternate ideology that rejects transcendence and equates humans and animals as more relevant and influential in philosophical thinking.