Journal of the History of Philosophy

This stimulating book covers a wide range of topics concerning Kant and the history of logic, with the overall goal of specifying how Kant's various conceptions of logic developed out of that history. A first chapter on methodology argues that Kant is properly understood as negotiating a middle way (christened "critical eclecticism") between eclecticism and systematic philosophy. This is combined with the author's views on the proper method for our reconstruction of Kant's philosophy of logic, where her idea is that Kant's own critical eclecticism will provide the key to the latter. One issue that is never addressed is why this is not a sort of category error: even if Kant's own views on methodology had featured a less significant role for history than they do, surely consulting his predecessors and reconstructing what he took from them would still have been an important tool for making sense of Kant.

The next two chapters offer a selective history of the philosophy of logic emphasizing elements that might prove important, with the first taking up that history from Aristotle [End Page 618] through the sixteenth century, and the second focusing on Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, and Wolff. Both chapters have the potential to be quite helpful to those working on Kant who lack a specialist's knowledge of these figures. That said, the clear lines of influence that make the later four figures directly relevant for understanding Kant are considerably hazier when it comes to figures such as Abelard and John of Salisbury. Accordingly, Lu-Adler offers this material as the background in which Kant's more immediate predecessors situated their views.

Chapter four covers Kant's development from the mid-1760s through the emergence of his mature position, incorporating along the way helpful summaries of Knutzen, Baumgarten, and Meier. Perhaps the most fruitful portion of this chapter is a story of how Kant comes to insist on a sharp division between logics of the learned and common understanding (later to become the distinction between pure and applied logic), which enables him to do justice to two tracks that emerged in the pre-Kantian history, namely, insistence that logic is strict scientia, and another track exemplified by the Stoics, the humanists, and Locke (114). One puzzle that remains to be addressed is how the logic of common understanding can play a normative role (114) if it really just has experience as its principle (110, 113). The two logics are presented as "mutually independent" (141), but it seems that their relation must be somewhat subtler.

Two topics predominate in the remainder of the book, beginning in chapter four. First, Lu-Adler offers a wide-ranging and at points perceptive interpretation of transcendental logic (TL), one plank of which is that TL can be sufficiently distinguished from pure, general logic (PGL) without adopting a "non-intentional" interpretation of PGL's formality. The key is that TL is essentially concerned with how our thought relates to objects, while PGL is not (160). One of the main conclusions of chapter four's developmental story is that "Kant ushered in a notion of [TL] on grounds that had less to do—at least not in any direct way—with deep philosophical concerns about logic than with the status of metaphysics or ontology as a proper science" (139). Admittedly, this claim is correct on a narrow and anachronistic reading of logic as concerned merely with rules of correct inference. But why introduce a foreign conception of logic to evaluate Kant? Part of the motivation emerges later when the author argues that we should not expect TL to fit neatly as a species within the genus "logic in general" precisely because it results from the search for a scientific metaphysics (159). Bracketing the worry just expressed, I fail to see why the truth of the latter would exempt TL from occupying a determinate place in Kant's taxonomy. Indeed, the author's...