Title: Critical Belief in the Unconditioned: Kant's Antinomy as a Positive Response to Skepticism about Reason
Abstract: I argue for a reading of the Critique of Pure
Reason that addresses several related inadequacies in Kant
scholarship. First, I argue that the problem of skepticism with
which the Critique is centrally concerned is not the problem of
skepticism about the external world or about ordinary knowledge but
rather the problem of skepticism about reason. This latter problem
of skepticism, I argue, is rooted in the difficulty of providing a
philosophical account of the faculty of theoretical reason that
preserves its unity while at the same time doing justice to its
various intrinsic, but seemingly incompatible aims. Second, I argue
that, in order to understand the Critique as responding to this
problem, we need to rethink this work as providing not just a
metaphysics of experience but also a metaphysics of reason. I
provide an account of the nature of theoretical reason that reveals
its teleological structure, including the aims both of the
understanding and of reason as the highest intellectual faculty.
With this account I argue that Kant’s positive theory of reason
extends beyond the Transcendental Analytic and ultimately into the
Antinomy of Pure Reason chapter of the Dialectic, where the problem
of skepticism about reason and its eventual solution are fully
articulated. Third, I offer a novel reading of Kant’s solution to
the Antinomy by showing how Kant’s conception of belief is
implicitly at work in it. With this reading I provide a new account
of Kant’s justification for the doctrine of transcendental
idealism, understood metaphysically. That is, I argue that Kant’s
solution to the Antinomy and his completed account of the
metaphysics of reason involves the justified assertion that there
exists a non-spatial, non-temporal, unconditioned ground of
natureI¢âÂa thing in itself. My reading of Kant’s
account of the unity of theoretical reason has implications for
Kant’s account of the unity of reason as a whole. It shows Kant to
have established a much tighter relation between theoretical and
practical reasonI¢âÂand, with it, a more sophisticated and
comprehensive response to the Enlightenment need for a rationally
grounded account of faithI¢âÂthan is generally recognized in the
literature.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-07-15
Language: en
Type: article
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