Why Transcendental Logic is no Logic at All

Consider Kant’s famous acknowledgment in the opening remarks to his Prolegomena: Hume’s critique of induction, he famously notes, had awakened him of his dogmatic slumber. Is it not a little puzzling? Hume explicitly criticized Locke’s philosophy of science: he portrayed the limits of Locke’s empiricism. Kant (even in his deepest of dogmatic slumbers) was no advocate of Locke’s philosophy of science. He was certainly no empiricist. Rather, to the extant that such matters can be determined at all, he was a Leibnizian (or, perhaps more accurately, a Wolffian). Leibniz, let me stress, was the greatest critic of Locke until Hume came around. So what exactly had impressed Kant in Hume’s criticism of a philosophy he did not advocate, to the point of shattering his old (completely opposite) philosophy?

Importantly, Kant deserves here credit which he does not take, and one for which he is hardly ever credited: his distinctive understanding of Hume’s critique is one of his great contributions to philosophy. He understood Hume to have implied the bankruptcy of Leibniz’s project, the project of rationalizing the conflation of science and traditional logic (by means of the explicit founding of the former on the latter). Hume, let me stress, simply did not speak in those terms.