Constraint-First Epistemology: Normativity, Conditioned Agency, and the Non-Zero Kantian Floor

Both Kantian philosophy and Buddhist thought reject the possibility of epistemic immediacy. Yet contemporary comparative philosophy still lacks a stableaccount of how normativity survives once cognition is fully acknowledged to beconditioned. If all cognition is mediated, and if agency does not originate from anunconditioned subject, why are some frameworks better than others? This articledevelops a constraint-first epistemology to address this problem. I argue that finitecognition entails a non-zero floor of mediation—not as a metaphysical essence, butas a structural condition of corrigible inquiry derivable from three minimal premisesconcerning distinguishability, causal connectivity, and finite propagation speed.From this, normativity is derived as constitutive rather than optional: without responsiveness to constraint, inquiry collapses. The derivation meets the Madhyamakaanti-reification challenge directly by grounding normativity in relational invariantsrather than intrinsic natures. Buddhist dependent origination complements thispicture by grounding agency in conditioned yet revisable processes rather thanin a substantial self. Engaging directly with Evan Thompson, Jay Garfield, andMark Siderits, I argue that each captures a crucial dimension of the problem—transformability, anti-reification, and reduction of self, respectively—but none fullyaccounts for the relation between irreducible mediation and structural normativity.Against Thompson, I argue that transformability does not abolish the floor, evenin pure consciousness events. Against Garfield, I argue that anti-reification doesnot preclude relational invariants. Against Siderits, I argue that reduction of selfdoes not yet explain why inquiry remains constitutively answerable. The resultingframework is not a synthesis of Kant and Buddhism, but a broader account in whichboth appear as special cases of a more general constraint-first epistemology.