Kant's Reform of Metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered

by Karin de Boer

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.

310 pages, Hardcover

Published September 3, 2020

Reviews

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think there are at least a few insightful chapters in this book. The one on noumena I think offers a well considered more nuanced account of Kant's various appeals to things in themselves, noumena and transcendental object X, showing some of the metaphysical involvements in Kant's claims that remain, akin to readings such as Americks, and opposed to conceptualist accounts such as Allison.

The general approach also of positioning Kant within the tradition of his forebears of Wolff and Crusius, and responding to them at times within similar terms of debate, rather than outright refuting them with a new type of protagorean philosophy and Copernican transcendental turn, I find to be a useful one.

However, I found her criticisms of other more metaphysical accounts, such as the moderate metaphysics of Allais to be too peremptory. This was too quickly dismissed as like Strawson and Guyer in their more "metaphysical" readings, when this ignores that Allais demarcates clearly from the phenomenalist view of experience of Strawson, and talks of a subject-dependence to space and time, rather than them being contained in the mind to give due allowance to an element of realism in Kant's account.

This is crucial, because de boer goes on herself to presume often the correctness of the phenomenalist account and the mind-contained nature of space and time, in ways that our detrimental to her own attempts at establishing a more metaphysical doctrine in Kant. Further, and as a result, De boer tries to argue that Kant's empirical realism is more just like a common sense approach, in which we are asked to take what science or common sense says about certain realities on trust. But this I find to be inadequately critical and unappreciative of how Kant aims to provide a more comprehensive metaphysical grounding to the claims of science, rather than just apologistically taking them on trust. It is this kind of thinking that would land us dangerously back near to a Strawsonian empiricist reading of Kant, which is not a surprise given De Boer's assumption often of a phenomenalist representational view of Kantian experience. Rather than a presentational and direct element being involved that grounds the experience in a moderate metaphysical setting that is irreducible and separate from purely epistemological questions of justification.

It is in this kind of area, regarding justification that I think the most unappealing part of the book appears, which is her interpretation of the transcendental deduction. Many, to my mind, incoherent strands are thrown together to try and make this work. The faculty of imagination, time, normative rule giving procedures, the schematism are all run together as providing some sort of support for the deduction as one big block. In this area, my personal view, in line with a moderate metaphysical approach, is that much of the transcendental idealism is established in the aesthetic and that an extra deduction does not add much to it and that indeed the idea of such a deduction is largely flawed because of the weaknesses in the transcendental logic. Space and time, as forms of experience, cannot be deduced in any rigorous manner of any type of logical sense, but we can intuit this to be a correct approach to understanding the grounding for our experience of our surrounding reality.

[Dan DalMonte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book views key parts of Kant's first Critique in light of the history of metaphysics from the rationalist Christian Wolff to the absolute idealism of Hegel. de Boer critiques strictly epistemological interpretations of Kant which reduce transcendental idealism to a mere limitation on cognition. While seeking to limit metaphysics to possible experience, Kant did not abandon the idea of creating a complete system of pure reason. The distinction was that the ideas of reason, embodied in the "unconditioned" notions of the soul, the world, and God, cannot be cognizable objects of the understanding. I give only three stars because it is not entirely clear how de Boer's work is distinctive. Many other commentators, including Ameriks and Anja Jauernig, portray Kant as sympathetic to metaphysics instead of its destroyer. de Boer's writing is also kind of dense, but it is difficult to write in lucid lapidary prose when dealing with Kant. I especially appreciate the chapter on the meaning of "transcendental" in transcendental idealism. This word comes from the transcendentals of scholastic philosophy, which sought to understand the most general characteristics of being involving both God and creatures. Kant shifts the most basic features of being to the human mind, hence transcendental idealism.