J. Colin McQuillan - Immanuel Kant: The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason

This book is a study of the background, development, exposition, and justification of Kants Critique of Pure Reason. It differs from other books on the same subject by focusing on Kants conception of critique, rather than his arguments for the transcendental ideality of space and time, his deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the objections he raises against traditional metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic. The latter have been studied in exhaustive detail, but up to this point there has not been a single work that explains why Kant called the Critique of Pure Reason a critique. I regard this as a serious oversight in an otherwise exemplary body of scholarship.

I realize this claim will be met with surprise, if not suspicion. In the end, there are very few commentaries, introductions, and guides that are helpful for understanding Kants conception of critique.

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While I do not claim to have understood set metaphysics on the sure path of science.

Although Moses Mendelssohn called him the all-crushing Kant in the Preliminary Remarks to his Morning Hours (1786), Kant did not The fact that this process did not continue after 1781 suggests that Kants conception of critique played a much greater role in the development of his critical philosophy than the scholarly literature would lead readers to believe.

This interpretation of Kants critique is supported by close readings of programmatic passages from the Critique of Pure Reason and other works; however, it requires that we overcome some of the prejudices many of us hold about the nature of critique and the aims of criticism. In order to begin this process, I survey the different senses in which the word critique was used during the Enlightenment in chapter 1. Kant called the Enlightenment the genuine age of criticism for a reason; critique and its cognates were extremely popular terms in in the eighteenth century. They were so popular and so widely used that some scholars have denied that it is possible to determine what they mean exactly; yet it is possible see what Kants critique has in common with other conceptions of critique and where it differs, by placing his terminology in its historical context and considering the background against which he defined his critical philosophy.

Having considered the historical context in which Kant formulated his critique in chapter 1, I begin to reconstruct the problem he intended his critique to solve in chapter 2. This problem can be traced back to Kants pre-critical attempts to determine the proper method of metaphysics, which began in the 1750s with the New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755), but intensified after the success of his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (1764) in the Prussian Royal Academys prize-essay contest in 1763. While some scholars claim that Kant experienced a crisis during the 1760s and came to doubt the possibility and even the desirability of metaphysics, closer examination of works from this period reveals that Kant was making plans for an ambitious, systematic treatise on the proper method of metaphysics. He faced a number of difficulties as he tried to complete this treatise, but he never denied that metaphysics was possible or desirable.

Kants plans for a new and improved metaphysics continued to evolve in the early for his critical philosophy, because it is the critique of pure reason that explains how the pure concepts of the understanding can relate to objects.

Turning from the development of Kants critical philosophy to the Critique of Pure Reason itself, I consider in chapter 4 the definitions of a critique of pure reason that Kant presents in the Preface and Introduction to the first (A)

Finally, in chapter 5, I explore the justifications Kant offers for his critique in response to negative reviews and objections from empiricist and rationalist critics. In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), he argues that his critique is necessary of pure reason are still worth noting.

While I think these chapters make important contributions to Kant scholarship, I do not expect them to be the last word on Kants critique or its relation to his critical philosophy. On the contrary, I hope they inspire new debates about some of the most basic features of the critical philosophy, more informed discussions about why they are critical, and continued research on the ways Kant thought his critique would set metaphysics on the sure path of science. Given widespread doubts about the value of Kants theoretical philosophy and general skepticism about metaphysics, I think these developments are both necessary and worthwhile.