Précis of The World According to Kant―Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Throughout the history of the reception of his philosophy, Kant has often been read as a thoroughly anti-metaphysical thinker.According to this kind of reading, he is squarely focused on, and his positive contributions in theoretical philosophy are confined to, epistemology, whereas his contributions to metaphysics are merely negative, consisting in a scathing critique.Despite its popularity, this anti-metaphysical reading has not gone unchallenged, however.There have been several periods since the early nineteenth century in which metaphysics-friendly readings have flourished.Surveying contemporary Kant scholarship, it is becoming harder and harder to deny that one of these periods is right now.I count myself among the dissenters from the anti-metaphysical paradigm.As I read him, Kant is not opposed to metaphysics per se but merely to the method that metaphysicians have employed before him.As far as the cognition of freedom, God, and immortality is concerned, which is metaphysics' 'final aim,' Kant's methodological correction is to argue that this cognition is possible only 'in a practical respect,' that is, by relying on substantive premises that can be justified only in the context of his practical philosophy, based on considerations about the conditions for the possibility of rational agency.But his theoretical philosophy also contains quite a bit of metaphysics, which supplies the basic framework in which his practical philosophy is developed and without which it could not even get off the ground.The metaphysical content of Kant's theoretical philosophy is his critical idealism, understood as an ontological position.His methodological innovation in the theoretical context consists in relying on broadly epistemological considerations about the nature and function of human cognitive faculties in order to derive ontological conclusion about the nature and ontological status of various kinds of entities.In The World According to Kant, I offer an interpretation of Kant's critical idealism understood as an ontological position, provide a detailed analysis of his arguments for it, and identify the
DOI: 10.1111/phpr.13097
Author: Anja Jauernig
Institution: New York University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402345054