ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been a growing convergence between the two mainstreams of contemporary philosophy, the so-called analytic and continental schools of thought. The philosophical tradition has offered an alternative to metaphysics and transcendental argument, an alternative that presents an all too neglected strategy for overcoming their difficulties and pursuing a systematic philosophy of an entirely different order. The original proponent of this alternative is G. W. F. Hegel and in the Introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit he sketches out its basic strategy. The observed truth claims are rather only beliefs generated by the subject matter, a subject matter that is itself ascribed no ontological or transcendental status, but merely taken for granted as a version of knowing posited by the phenomenologist herself. Nevertheless, non-transcendental phenomenology is a very special positive science because its given object has the unique character of making its own truth claims and also testing them by itself.
