ABSTRACT
The more insidious challenge finds its greatest voice in the heart of the oldest democracies and civil societies, where, under the multiple banners of post-Modernism, the very autonomy of reason and conduct has come under suspicion. The underlying problem bedeviling all of these efforts of transcendental philosophy is the abiding discrepancy between the knowing exercised by the transcendental investigator and the knowing under critique. Logically speaking, this discrepancy exhibits the perennial incoherence of any foundationalism: namely, that the privileged factor that confers normativity does not and indeed cannot itself enjoy the validity it provides. The rationale for measuring conduct by the good simply translates into another idiom the same line of reasoning that leads metaphysical philosophy to seek foundations for reality and reason. This foundational exercise can be interpreted in an empiricist manner, according to which liberty consists in the entitled freedom to act in pursuit of given desires.
