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Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics1—I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

What is the Critique of Pure Reason about? The terminology of the work is so perplexing, its argument so obscurely expressed, that the ordinary reader may be forgiven if he puts it down at the end very much in the dark as to what it all means. He will have seen that in it Kant has attempted to establish certain conclusions: the subjectivity of space and time, the existence and objective validity of a number of a priori concepts or categories, the falsity of the arguments used to defend the metaphysical system most widely favoured in German learned circles in the eighteenth century; but though he has grasped all this he may yet have failed to make sense of the work as a whole. It is the old story of not seeing the wood for trees; and in this case the fault is more excusable than in most, for the individual trees each demand so much attention and are so difficult to get round that it is all too easy to forget the very existence of the wood. At the worst, one may think that there is no wood at all; only a miscellaneous aggregate of individual trees which have nothing to do with each other.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1939

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References

page 313 note 2 E.g. B xxiii, B 766 = A 738.

page 313 note 3 Cf. letter to Herz, later than May II, 1781 (Berlin edition, X, 252), where the Critique is said to contain the “metaphysic of metaphysics” (reference in Vleeschauwer, La deduction transcendentale, I, 61).

page 313 note 4 B 869 = A 814.

page 314 note 1 Compare the handbook of metaphysics outlined in the latter to Jacob, September 11 (?), 1787 (X, 471). Of course there would also have been analyses setting out derivative concepts in such a system (cf. B 107 = A 82, B 249 = A 204), but the general framework would have been set by the results of the Critique of Pure Reason.

page 314 note 2 In the rest of this paper the term “sense-experience” must be taken to include introspection.

page 314 note 3 E.g. in Prolegomena, § 5.

page 316 note 1 Prolegomena, Introduction; cf. B24.

page 316 note 2 In all this Kant seems to be speaking rather loosely. What we are all interested in are the questions which metaphysics traditionally asks about the existence of God, the soul, and so forth. But the reformed metaphysics which the critical philosophy is to make possible does not treat of such subjects; to speak roughly, it is the sum of our synthetic a priori knowledge so far as that is not mathematical. Its only mention of the traditional topics is to show that they involve questions which from the state of our intellectual make-up we are unable to answer.

page 317 note 1 B xxxiii. Kant's position is obviously closely analogous to that of theologians and Christian philosophers who have sought to discredit intellectual proofs of the dogmas of religion so that they may fall back on the (intellectually impregnable) evidence of revelation to maintain them. But no one would claim that Kant's is a religious philosophy except in a very

page 317 note 2 Cf. , Hume, Treatise, p. 212 (Selby-Bigge).Google Scholar

page 318 note 1 E.g. B 178 = A 139.

page 318 note 2 Provided, that is, that we do not interpret moral and religious experience as a source of metaphysical knowledge.

page 318 note 3 A letter of Kant's to Herz, May 1, 1781 (X, 249), announces the impending publication of the Critique and says that it brings to completion the series of meditations undertaken in common since the defence of the Dissertation (reference in Vleeschauwer, op. cit., I, 154).

page 319 note 1 Cf. especially §§ 13 ff.

page 319 note 2 § 8: “No empirical principles are to be found in metaphysics.”

page 319 note 3 § 10 init.

page 319 note 4 § 8.

page 319 note 5 § 10. Presumably the meaning is that though we cannot know an intelligible world (a world of things in themselves: § 4) in its individual detail, we can know it through “universal concepts in the abstract,’ i.e. have insight into its general nature.

page 319 note 6 Wundt, M., Kant als Metaphysiker, quoted by Vleeschauwer, I, 66, 148.Google Scholar

page 320 note 1 Intellectus. This is the word equated by Baumgarten (Met., § 402) with Verstand, whilst ratio is Vernunft (§ 640). But neither in Baumgarten nor in Kant's inaugural Dissertation is the critical distinction between the two faculties to be found. “Intellect” in the Dissertation, as in normal English, covers both Verstand and Vernunft.

page 320 note 2 Vleeschauwer (op. cit., I, 157, 204–6), agreeing with Riehl and Wundt, sees in the usus logicus of the intellect in the Dissertation the nucleus of the mature transcendental deduction. If this means that the procedure of the intellect so far as it operates logically is conceived in 1770 as analogous to that of the understanding as a “transcendental” faculty in the doctrine of the Critique, that does not seem to be true. The logical use of the intellect is nearer the logical use of understanding in 1781: something which holds good in all sciences (and therefore presumably in metaphysics itself). It is doubtful whether Vleeschauwer is right in saying (p. 157) that the concepts. on which the intellect operates in its logical use are all drawn from the senses.: Kant does not say this, but merely that all the concepts must be given; the source need not be specified. The real use of the intellect seems to be the I source of the categories; but to all appearances Kant had not yet realized the need of a transcendental deduction of pure concepts.

page 321 note 1 The concept of number, the basis of arithmetic, is declared in Dissertation, § 12, to be intellectual (though cf. § 23), but to “demand for its actualization in the concrete the auxiliary notions of time and space (in the successive addition and juxtaposition of a plurality).” On the connection of time and arithmetic, see Smith's, Kemp commentary to the Critique, pp. 128–34Google Scholar. Kant does not mention algebra in the Dissertation. For his view of it in the Critique see Paton, , Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, I, pp. 157–8.Google Scholar

page 322 note 1 We are also said to know moral concepts through the pure intellect (§ 7). The likeness of the general theory to the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas is striking.

page 322 note 2Vel rerum vel respectuum” (§ 5).

page 322 note 3 On the other hand, since the “intellect” of the Dissertation is essentially metaphysical, it is precisely what reason pretends to be in the Critique. As already said, “intellect” covers both reason and understanding.

page 323 note 1 Cf. also e.g. B 87–8 = A 63 and Prolegomena, § 33.

page 324 note 1 It must not be thought that the use of this word here and later implies agreement with Professor C. I. Lewis's view of the arbitrary character of a priori propositions.

page 324 note 2 Of course it is widely held that mathematical propositions are not synthetic but analytic. The reason for this is that all the propositions of a given mathematical system can be deduced from a number of primary propositions, together with the definitions of a number of primary concepts, by aid of the law of contradiction alone. But this does not prove that the primary propositions and definitions are not themselves synthetic, and if they are, so is the body of the science. That they are seems to be a reasonable view, since otherwise it is hard to see what internal significance the system could have, or what would differentiate it from any other similar system. It would be like a set of trucks without anything to set it in motion. Cf. Kant, Prolegomena, § 2: “A synthetic proposition can indeed be comprehended according to the law of contradiction, but only by presupposing another synthetic proposition from which it follows.” Kant himself, of course, believes that mathematical propositions are not only thus synthetic by derivation but also in their own right; but in this he seems to be mistaken.