ABSTRACT
In C2.6 I differentiated two senses of ‘ontology’: the sense in which everything is within being and the sense in which we might want to demarcate specifically ontological as opposed to, for instance, epistemological, relational or ethical dialectics. I defended ontological arguments and contended that it was inconceivable that the term ‘ontology’ not refer. I constrasted three compatible uses to which the concept might be put: (1) to distinguish philosophical from scientific ontologies (the latter consisting in the specific ontics of determinate transitive epistemic inquiries); or as a unified concept either (2) picking out different orders of abstraction, levels of inquiry, domains of extension, perspectival angles, etc. or (3) designating some characteristically dialectical mechanism or manoeuvre, such as contradiction or emergence, master-slave relations or constellationality, and applying it across disciplinary boundaries. I have also argued in previous publications that philosophical ontology in sense (1) need not be dogmatic and transcendent, but may be immanent and conditional, taking as its subject-matter just that world investigated by science (presupposed or acted on by other social practices) yet from the standpoint of what can be established about it by transcendental argument. This counters the traditional Humean-Kantian objection to ontology, but leaves the necessity of the conclusions contingent upon the acceptability of the premisses. Hegel claims to get round this in an immanent selfentailing/validating phenomenological circle. In this chapter I shall explore how one can establish transcendental arguments both (a) for, as distinct from, science and (b) for transcendental realism (or, more generally, for dialectical critical realism) without recourse to science, so tying the metacritical knot without Hegelian metaphysical rope.
