Abstract
This paper illustrates how Kant’s demand for “systematicity” couches his metaphysics necessarily in a scientific idea of metaphysics. Though Kant’s take on metaphysics is induced by an urge for systematizing metaphysics along the contours of the “scientific” paradigm, this quest for systematization is, at the same time, meant as a scathing attack on, what Kant calls, “dogmatic” metaphysics. It is as an antidote to such “dogmatic” metaphysics that Kant articulates his transcendental metaphysics primarily as a “critical” and “scientific” enterprise. In this background, this paper takes a closer look at the methodological moves that are involved in making his case, in order to track the steps involved in the body of argument that constitute Kant’s critical metaphysics. The focus of the paper is to delineate the contingent and necessary methodological moves that come to define Kant’s championing for scientific metaphysics. Consequently, the paper will seek to illuminate the “incongruous” ground upon which Kant’s idea of “critical” metaphysics itself stands with respect to the distinction he makes between the actuality and the possibility of metaphysics.
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Notes
For scholarly references to this division see, Henry Allison, “General Introduction”, Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 2–3; Henry Allison, “Editor’s Introduction”, What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff? in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, p. 342; for other references to this division, see Eckart Forster, “Kant’s Notion of Philosophy”, The Monist, Vol. 72, No. 2, (April 1989), pp. 285–304; Karin de Boer, “The Vicissitudes of Metaphysics in Kant and Early Post-Kantian Philosophy”, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T. 71, Fasc. 2/3, MetafisicaMetafísica: PerspectivasHistóricas e seusActores/Metaphysics: Historical Perspectives and its Actors (2015), pp. 267–286.
The entire “critical” tradition of thinkers leading up to Habermas and Foucault can be regarded as essentially hinged upon this idea of ‘critical’ thinking in philosophical speculation.
One can locate most of the works that came out post P. F. Strawson’s Bounds of Sense (1966) within the scholarship that dwelt upon the epistemological implications of the sections of ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Analytic’ that comprises the first half of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
As we see later that for Kant, this claim made by “critical metaphysics”, as a metaphysical edifice of knowledge, is foundational to the edifice of science itself for the reason that metaphysics provides the foundation for the understanding of the a priori constituents engrained in the scientific claim of objectivity and universality of its laws.
See, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, “Introduction”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 36.
Immanuel Kant, “Inaugural Dissertation”, Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755s–1770, Translation by David Walford, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 387.
See Kant’s correspondence with Johann Heinrich Lambert, in letter 57, September 2, 1770, 10: 98, Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, Translated and Edited by Arnulf Zweig, Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; See also, “Inaugural Dissertation”, Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, Translated and Edited by D. Walford and R. Meerbote, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Ibid. “Correspondence with J. H. Lambert”, 10: 99–100; pp. 108–109. To this letter Lambert replies by raising concerns regarding the possibility of generating a priori “general principles” that bring together these two separate sources of knowing. Ibid., 10: 105; p. 115.
See Kant, “Correspondence”, letter 58 from Marcus Herz, September 11, 1770, 10:100; Cf. “Introduction”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, where Mendelssohn is regarded as a Wolffian, p. 31.
Henry Allison, “Translator’s Introduction”, “On a discovery whereby any new critique of pure reason is to be made superfluous by an older one”, Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, Edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 273.
See, Henry Allison, “Translator’s Introduction”, “On a discovery whereby any new critique of pure reason is to be made superfluous by an older one”, p. 277.
See, Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, 2:395, p. 387.
This point is more emphatically put in the beginning of the “Introduction” to the second edition where Kant writes; “There is no doubt whatever that all our cognition begins with experience; for how else should the cognitive faculty be awakened into exercise if not through objects that stimulate our senses and in part themselves produce representations, in part bring the activity of our understanding into motion to compare these…thus to work up the raw material of sensible impressions into a cognition of objects that is called experience? As far as time is concerned, then, no cognition in us precedes experience, and with experience every cognition begins.” (B 1). [Emphasis in the original].
Though belief in the existence of faculty of reason, and its primordial role in cognition as the seat of a priori knowledge had been assumed by philosophers prior to Kant, such as by Plato and Leibniz, the revelation that this single faculty of reason can generate two distinct kinds of a priori knowledge, one that can be indirectly traceable to the sensible realm, and one that cannot be traceable to the sensible realm, is a discovery novel to Kant.
See, Guyer and Wood, “Notes”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 755.
The thinkers who seem to represent the kind of metaphysics that Kant opposes are exemplified in the works of Christian Wolff (1679–1754), and his follower Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762). Nevertheless, Kant was not alone in his critical stance towards what he calls dogmatic metaphysics. He had predecessors in the likes of David Hume (1711–1776), John Locke (1632–1704), and a third group of philosophers who adhered to popular philosophy of commonsense whom Kant labels as Indifferentists. This third group is represented by Thomas Reid (1710–1796). See Guyer and Wood “Introduction”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 2.
Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992; See also, Michela Massimi, “Philosophy of Natural Science from Newton to Kant”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44 (2013), p. 393; Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969. Buchdahl and Friedman have a debate with respect to the precision of the analogy between the “laws” of nature and the “laws” of metaphysical cognition in relation to the role played by the faculty of reason in it. The debate is upon the question whether the analogy implies the regulative role of reason or the constitutive role of reason.
Hein van den Berg, “Kant’s conception of proper science”, Synthese, Vol. 183, No. 1, (November 2011), pp. 7–8; see also, Gerd Buchdahl, “The relation between “Understanding” and “Reason” in the Architectonic of Kant’s philosophy”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 67 (1966–1967), pp. 209–226; Michael Friedman and Graham Bird, “Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 72 (1998), pp. 111–129 + 131–151.
Guyer and wood, “Introduction”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 25.
David Walford, Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, p. 417.
Ibid.
Immanuel Kant, “New Elucidation”, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, p. 11.
Immanuel Kant, “Inquiry”, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, p. 256.
Jong notes that Kant restricts the relevance of analytic-synthetic distinction to cognitive judgments that constitute the edifice of science, and in this regard Kant excludes logic from this domain, within which this distinction is applicable. As Jong points out Kant makes the difference between a priori and a posteriori judgments on the basis of the sources of cognition, but the analytic-synthetic distinction differentiates between two types of cognition on the basis of the content of cognition. Thus analytic-synthetic distinction pertains to the content of propositions. Willem R. de Jong, “The analytic-synthetic distinction and the classical model of science: Kant, Bolzano and Frege”, Synthese, Vol. 174, No. 2, The Classical Model of Science I: A Millennia-old Model of Scientific Rationality (May 2010), pp. 237–261.
See Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins: Descartes to Kant, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.
Immanuel Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”, in Practical Philosophy, Edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 104–105.
Ibid.
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Babu, R., Jung, P. The “Incongruous Move”: From Actuality to Possibility of Metaphysics in Kant. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 35, 463–481 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0149-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0149-7