Karin de Boer

This article seeks to demonstrate that Kant throughout the Critique of Pure Reason employs a type of analogical reasoning that belongs to the methodical backbone of the work. More specifically, I take him to draw on disciplines such as mathematics, general logic, and empirical psychology to expose the a priori features of human cognition at stake in his analyses. After examining Kant’s own comments on the use of analogies in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena, the Critique of Judgment and relevant lecture transcripts, I outline the predicative type of analogical reasoning I take to be employed in the Critique of Pure Reason itself. Turning from theory to practice, I analyze Kant’s use of (1) metaphors, (2) analogical inferences intended to clarify concepts such as transcendental illusion, and (3) analogical inferences that inform key arguments, namely, the metaphysical deduction and the so-called subjective deduction contained in the 1781 edition of the Critique. In each case, I argue, Kant’s sustained attempt to illuminate the a priori dimension of the human mind by means of analogical inferences is akin to the use of analogical inferences in former natural theology to obtain cognitions of God.

In this article I aim to clarify the nature of Kant’s transformation of rationalist metaphysics into a science by focusing on his conception of transcendental reflection. The aim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued, consists primarily in liberating the productive strand of former general metaphysics - its reflection on the a priori elements of all knowledge - from the uncritical application of these elements to all things (within general metaphysics itself) and to things that can only be thought (in special metaphysics). After considering Kant’s conception of metaphysics and his various uses of the term ‘transcendental’ I closely examine his account of logical and transcendental reflection in the section entitled ‘On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’. Whereas commentators generally attribute the activity called transcendental reflection to Kant alone, I contend, first, that Kant regarded philosophy as such to rely on a mode of transcendental reflection and, second, that the critical mode of transcendental reflection enacted in the Critique itself yields insight into the reason why our a priori knowledge is limited to the realm of possible objects. This is illustrated by outlining the difference between Kant’s and Leibniz’ employment of the concepts of reflection.

While Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) is generally considered to stem from an empiricist phase of Kant’s development, this article contends that Kant in this text elaborates a critique of Wolffian metaphysics not because of its rationalism, but because of its assumption that the sensible and the intellectual constitute a continuum. After presenting Wolff’s continuist account of empirical and rational psychology and metaphysical cognition as such, I focus on Kant’s implicit and explicit engagement with Wolff in Dreams with the aim of arguing that the text testifies to his sustained effort to identify and set free the rational core of Wolffian metaphysics.

In this article, I compare Kant and Fichte’s metaphilosophical commitments by focusing on their conceptions of critique. Both philosophers, I argue, combined their provisional elaborations of first-order metaphysics with a second-order inquiry into the conditions under which such metaphysics can be turned into a science. Fichte departed from Kant, however, by obfuscating the normative strand of Kant’s conception of critique. I further argue that Fichte’s anodyne conception of critique went hand in hand with the elaboration of a new type of metaphilosophy in the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science, namely, the attempt to derive the principles of deficient philosophical systems from the ultimate principle of human cognition per se. Seen in this way, Fichte transformed the critique of metaphysics carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason into a post-critical type of metaphilosophy that can account for the possibility and necessity of transcendental idealism itself.

Over the past few decades many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel.

Commentaries on the B-Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason tend to focus on Kant's so-called Copernican turn. Much less attention has been paid to the fact that the B-Preface compares the achievement of the Critique to two different scientific procedures: the act of demonstrating a counter-intuitive hypothesis and the act of verifying its correctness by means of a cross-check. Whereas the first procedure seeks to prove that objective cognitions of noumena are impossible, the second procedure seeks to confirm the result of the first. In an allusive and elliptical footnote, Kant compares the second procedure to a procedure carried out by chemists. Deviating from the interpretations put forward by Falkenburg and Schmid, my reconstruction of this footnote puts Kant's use of the terms ‘metaphysician’ and ‘separated’ center stage. Drawing on Kant's distinction between general and special metaphysics in the B-Preface and the Architectonic, his comments on Plato, and other relevant texts, I argue that the footnote addresses, in an extremely compressed manner, Kant's largely implicit conception of the relation between the history of metaphysics, its projected scientific elaboration, and the tasks carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason.

In the Prolegomena, Kant contrasts the synthetic procedure employed in the Critique of Pure Reason with the analytic procedure carried out in the Prolegomena itself. Given the tangle of analyses, arguments, and alleged proofs that make up the Critique itself, however, it is hard to relate Kant's remarks on the method to the way he actually proceeds in this work. Unlike Merritt and Gava, among others, I argue that Kant's innovative use of the synthetic method consists not in the unification of two previously separated elements, but in the act of generating a sum total of cognitions without relying on anything given. Even though Kant in the Critique does not proceed synthetically in all regards, he arguably develops sets of synthetic a priori cognitions from a consideration of the functions of the pure understanding and pure reason per se. I support this reading by clarifying in which sense Kant actually proceeds synthetically in the Doctrine of Elements, in particular as regards his derivation of the synthetic a priori judgments generated by the pure understanding and pure reason. In the latter context, I focus on Kant's metaphysical deductions of the categories and the ideas of pure reason on which these judgments are based.

While we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not...

In the Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere, Kant uses the term ‘object’ in various ways and often without clearly signaling its different meanings. As a result, it is hard to gauge the extent to which Kant’s account of the object of cognition breaks new ground. In this article, I take the Critique to establish what is required to generate an object of cognition per se soleley by examining the various ways in which the human mind can objectify the content of its representations. To clarify this endeavor, I distinguish four different ways in which the term ‘object’ is used in the Critique, namely, to refer to (1) material things, (2) the content of any type of thought, (3) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the broad sense of the term, and (4) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the strict sense of the term. On my reading, the fourth meaning of the term ‘object’ is key to the Transcendental Deduction and completes Kant’s unprecedented conception of the cognitive acts by means of which the human mind produces objects of cognition out of a manifold of representations.

My response to Gabriele Gava’s Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics (2023) focuses on Kant’s conception of the role of critique in the Critique of Pure Reason. On my account, Gava’s emphasis on the constructive elements of the Critique downplays the critique of former metaphysics elaborated in all three parts of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. After some comments on Kant’s conception of the Critique as a doctrine of method, I support this view by discussing the relation between transcendental philosophy and transcendental critique, Kant’s analysis of the faculties, and his transcendental deduction of space.

"Recent years have seen a growing interest among scholars of 18th-century German philosophy in the period between Wolff and Kant. This book challenges traditional interpretations of this period that focus largely on post-Leibnizian rationalism and, accordingly, on a depreciation of the contribution of the senses to knowledge about the world and the self. It addresses the divergent ways in which eighteenth-century German philosophers reconceived the notion and role of experience in their efforts to identify, defend, and contest the contribution of foundational a priori principles and empirical data to the various branches of metaphysics, the natural sciences, and emerging disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. The chapters are organized according to the four major schools that defined the various phases of German Enlightenment philosophy: Wolff and Wolffianism, Eclecticism and Populärphilosophie, the Berlin Academy, and Kant. Each chapter is devoted to one or more philosophers, several of whom are seriously under investigated or even unknown outside small circles of specialists. By framing the period in terms of the notion of experience, this book presents a more nuanced understanding of the German reception of British and French ideas and theories, dismisses the prevailing view that German philosophy was largely isolated from European debates, introduces a number of relatively unknown, but highly relevant philosophers and developments to non-specialized scholars, and contributes to a better understanding of the richness and complexity of the German Enlightenment"--

The present paper aims to trace back Kant’s account of the schematism of the pure understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason to the Dissertation. I do so by discussing Kant’s understanding of sensible cognition in view of his assessment of metaphysics. I argue, first, that Kant in both texts aims to defend metaphysics against skeptical attacks by discarding those of its elements he considers unwarranted and, second, that this undertaking hinges on his account of concepts that function as the sensible condition of cognition. Yet whereas Kant argues in 1770 that metaphysics must be purely intellectual, he in 1781 draws on his earlier account of sensible concepts to argue, against the Wolffians, that determining intelligible objects by purely intellectual means does not amount to cognition proper.

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light.

The financial crisis that currently besets Europe not only disturbs the life of many citizens, but also affects our economic, political and philosophical theories. Clearly, many of the contributing causes, such as the wide availability of cheap credit after the introduction of the euro, are contingent. Analyses that aim to move beyond such contingent factors tend to highlight the disruptive effects of the neoliberal conception of the market that has become increasingly dominant over the last few decades. Yet while the financial sector has received most of the blame, and rightly so, few commentators seem willing to take into account the role played by representative democracy in its current form. Even if it is granted that actual democratic policies fall short of what they ought to achieve, contemporary representative democracy itself is seldom regarded as part of the tangle it was supposed to resolve. David Merill touches upon this issue when he notes, in the preceding issue of thisBulletin, that ‘the economic dilemmas faced today may be ultimately the consequences of state failure’. The state that has failed to regulate the markets is described as ‘weak’ and ‘subject to external blows, blind to its ends, merely one actor among many in the events of the day’ (Merill 2012: 28). Yet Merill does not seem to consider this weakness to be an inherent feature of the constellation of which contemporary democracy is a part.There are, of course, excellent reasons not to take this path. First, representative democracy has in many cases proved to be the best way of preventing small elites from acquiring political power, and many of the impressive social and political achievements of the twentieth century are the result of democratic processes.

Does philosophical critique have a future? What are its possibilities, limits, and presuppositions? Bringing together outstanding scholars from various traditions, this collection of essays is the first to examine the forms of critique that have shaped modern and contemporary continental thought. Through critical analyses of key texts by, among others, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, and Rancière, it traces the way critique has time and again geared itself towards new cultural, social, and political problems, shedding those of its assumptions no longer deemed tenable. It is our hope that the many voices of critique that arise from the present volume will produce effects – new doubts, new insights, new challenges, or new resources – that none could have achieved on their own.

Focusing on the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that the method Hegel employs in this work does not capture the full significance of the French Revolution. I claim that Hegel’s method is reformist rather than revolutionary: Hegel deliberately restricts his analyses to transformations that occur within the element of thought and presents the changes that occur within this element as logically ensuing from one another. This approach, I argue, is at odds with the very concept of a revolution. Seen in this way, efforts to frame Hegel’s philosophy as revolutionary are misguided.