Abstract
It is one of the effects caused by the critical philosophy, that metaphysics qua ontology and qua ‘metaphysica specialis’ has suffered discredit. Even the metaphysical systems of ‘German Idealism’ are, according to how they were understood by their authors, rooted in Kant’s insight, that ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics is impossible. When, in Germany around the end of the 19th century, neo-Kantianism arose, the essence of Kant’s critical philosophy was supposed to be its intrinsic connection with the natural sciences, especially Newtonian physics. The Critique of Pure Reason no longer found any interest as a systematic critique of all possible attempts to know the suprasensible, or as an attempt to rescue freedom of the will, which was seen as indispensible to morals. It was taken even less seriously as a destruction of a deductive ontology of the type of Christian Wolff. The effect of the first critique was so overwhelming that it has almost become commonplace to see the foundation of everyday or scientific experience as the proper task of theoretical philosophy. Had not Kant taught that all (theoretical) knowledge lies within the limits of actual or possible experience and that our concepts, including the mathematical ones, could not possibly have any sense and meaning, if the range of possible experience was left behind? He seemed to anticipate with this the fundamental thesis of Vienna Circle positivism, which was that every nonanalytic sentence which cannot be verified or falsified by experience is simply without significance.
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Notes
P. F. Strawson, Individuals, London 1959.
M. Scheler, Die transzendentale und die psychologische Methode [The Transcendental and the Psychological Method], Leipzig 1900, pp. 56f.
Eva Schaper has criticized Kömer convincingly. Her arguments partially agree with what is said here in Section III. Cf. E. Schaper, ‘ArguingTranscendentally’, Kant-Studien 63 (1972), 101–116.
Cf. J. Hintikka and U. Remes, The Method of Analysis. Its Geometrical Origin audits General Significance, Dordrecht 1974, and the literature there indicated.
This objection was raised by E. Adickes in: Die deutsche Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen [The German Philosophy in Self-Descriptions], Leipzig 1921, vol. 2, p. 10.
This is F. A. Lange’s objection in: Geschichte des Materialismus [History of Materialism], Leipzig7 1902, vol. II, p. 131.
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© 1979 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Baum, M. (1979). Transcendental Proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason . In: Bieri, P., Horstmann, RP., Krüger, L. (eds) Transcendental Arguments and Science. Synthese Library, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9410-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9410-2_1
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