Transcendental Pedagogy. Kant’s Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Philosophy as an Educational Project

Abstract

The philosophy of mind, and especially the critical philosophy (transcendental critique of reason) and philosophy of philosophy are presented here as a unique pedagogical endenavour. The work’s titular transcendental pedagogy (which is a term proposed by me solely for the use of the following paper) does not mean the theory of upbringing, but rather it’s practice. It works on two seperate levels: (self)upbringing and (self) education of reason in the critique, and (self)upbringing and (self)education of human in philosophy. It is transcendental, which means non-empirical, as it is a system of mental transformations made in abstracto in, so to speak, mental space of human selfconsciousness by means of entirely discursive and speculative tools. The critique of reason and Kant’s philosophy of philosophy are taken not only as tools and methods of this peculiar pedagogical process, but most of all as transformational intelectual practice. The concepts of upbringing, upbringee and upbringer are moved from the strictly pedagogical level into the field of the interpretation of Kant’s conception of philosophy (including the transcendental critique of reason). This philosophy is then shown as a tool for shaping both one’s own and the other’s minds. The paper is divided into two basic parts: the first one talks about the critique of reason as a discipline and education of reason, and the other one discusses philosophy as a tool for upbringing the human.