Reasonable Ideas: Metaphysics and Metametaphysics in Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic (DFG research project)
Project
This project casts a new light on Kant’s metaphysics and his meta-metaphysical considerations regarding its possibilities and limitations. The Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason has often been understood as expressing Kant’s thoroughly negative attitude towards traditional metaphysics. Kant’s critique of the claims to cognition of metaphysica specialis in rational psychology, cosmology and theology was further taken to imply an entirely anti-metaphysical understanding of his transformation of metaphysica generalis or ontology in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic. Contemporary debates in Kant scholarship have begun to point out the inadequacy of such an understanding of the first Critique, but have left important questions unanswered.
In this context, the project ‘Reasonable Ideas’ aims, on the one hand, to reconstruct Kant's answer to the meta-metaphysical question concerning the possibility of the representational, epistemic and doxastic relation to the objects of pure reason. On the other hand, the project aims at a more adequate understanding of Kant's critique and reinterpretation of the theses of traditional metaphysics by focusing on the paradigm cases of Kant's metaphysics of modality and the critique of the ontological argument, his theory of temporal determination with regard to its mereological structure, and Kant's reception and transformation of the rationalist principle of continuity. These parts of the project serve the overarching purpose of developing a nuanced and partially positive picture of Kant’s relationship to metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic, which does justice to contemporary debates in the scholarship and further develops these. In so doing, the project aims at revealing the potential of Kant’s conception of metaphysics for contemporary theoretical philosophy.
Researchers