ABSTRACT
The attempt to discover a transcendental ontology can be seen as the search for a confluence of theoretical philosophy’s three main rivers: epistemology, logic (in the Hegelian sense in particular) and ontology. In the discussion of Kant it was shown that he unifies epistemology and transcendental logic to exclude ontology. Hegel intended to unite all three but I have shown that both his epistemology and his ontology are driven by, but not in the end successfully unified with, philosophical logic – that, in short, his thought is insufficiently transcendental and so immanent.1 (Hegel thus provides arguments which go a large part of the way towards describing the basic logical structure of the cosmos – how it can be one yet many, self-identical yet full of differences, a subject yet in the form of objectivity etc. – but is unable to translate this basic threefold structure into the language of being.) In the discussion of Steiner I shall now attempt a brief demonstration of how the respective shortcomings of Kant’s sceptical transcendentalism and Hegel’s dialectic might be overcome in a transcendental ontology which unifies them.
