Kant’s Second Paralogism in Context

Abstract

It was Kant’s major aim to provide in his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) a novel and systematic account of almost all fields of theoretical philosophy, and so he did little to indicate anything of the contemporary debates from which his ideas sprang. Some of this context is of course well known, like the opposition between rationalism and empirism, or the contemporary import of Humean scepticism. In the first edition (1781) of the CPR (A redaction), in the chapter on the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason, ” the second paralogism forms, however, an important exception in this regard, and it seems that former commentators have not taken this into sufficient consideration. It is my main thesis that this section offers an opportunity to expose Kant’s relation to contemporary debates in a far more definite way. To be sure, these relations are not overt and thus rest also on reconstruction. So I will give first a detailed analysis of the second paralogism and then turn to the contemporary context.