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Introduction to the Topical Issue “Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation”

2022; De Gruyter; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/opphil-2022-0229

2543-8875

Michael Lewin, Rudolf Meer,

Philosophical Ethics and Theory

The Transcendental Dialectic was for a long time an insufficiently studied section of the Critique of Pure Reason.This is surprising, given that division two of the Transcendental Logic forms the largest part of Kant's first Critique.Concentrating on the destructive side of Kant's critical project, Kant's critics and interpreters seem to have established an exegetical paradigm that left his positive account of transcendental ideas and metaphysics out of focus.In recent decades, however, there has been a wave of re-evaluation of the structure and function of the Transcendental Dialectic.The "other side" of the Transcendental Dialectic and the role of metaphysics in science and more generally have rightfully claimed their place among the most central topics in Kant research.The topical issue Kant's Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation aims at contributing to this paradigm shift.The goal is to highlight the capacity of the Dialectic to raise metaphysical problems based on Kant's critical project and ultimately to emphasize its potential for current debates.The focus of our discussion of the Transcendental Dialectic is on the introduction, the first book, and the appendix, but also on the function that the second book plays in this context.This issue covers many aspects of the basic topics and recent debates on Kant's Transcendental Dialectic:Rudolf Meer reconstructs Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis' principle of least action as one of the numerous historical sources for Kant's regulative use of reason.Starting with Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens and referring also to Critique of the Power of Judgment, he explores the specific status of teleological principles in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic.Michael Lewin examines nine correlated marks that constitute the Kantian concept of reason as the faculty of ideas: (1) faculty, (2) rational, (3) the narrower sense, (4) intermediate inferences, (5) ideas (seven kinds), (6) principles, (7) uses, (8) interests and ends, and (9) unity.The conceptual structure is centered around (5).James Kreines argues for the so-called Dialectic-first approach to the Critique of Pure Reason.Kant's critical argument against rationalist metaphysics presupposes positive claims about reason and the unconditioned in the Transcendental Dialectic.The overall project of the first Critique can be understood better if one does not draw assumptions about its aims from any other sections.The subject of the article by Mario Caimi is the passages from A299/B355 and A305/B362 of the Critique of Pure Reason.He shows that the "the real use of reason" (usus realis) proves itself as an unavoidable condition for the regulative use of ideas as well as a condition for the production of a critical metaphysics.Stefan Klingner considers the question of how Kant's derivations of metaphysical concepts from the nature of pure reason and from the transcendental ideas work.In doing so, he reconstructs not merely the leading ideas of rational psychology, cosmology, and theology, but the origin of the entire a priori vocabulary of the metaphysica specialis.