Abstract
The essay investigates the relation between metaphysics and practical philosophy in Kant by reconstructing Kant‘s systematic typology of metaphysics as developed in his critical writings. Section 1 deals with Kant’s rigorous reduction of philosophy to metaphysics. The focus here is on the epistemological turn effectuated by Kant with regard to metaphysics (theoretical metaphysics). Section 2 is concerned with Kant’s reconceptualization of (pure) practical philosophy as a metaphysics sui generis. At the center stands here Kant’s supplementation of the metaphysics of nature through a metaphysics of morals based on moral freedom (practical metaphysics). Section 3 addresses the merging of theoretical and practical metaphysics in Kant. The focus here lies on Kant’s introduction of a novel, practically validated form of (quasi-)theoretical metaphysics (practico-theoretical metaphysics). Throughout the essay combines an analytic interest in the forms and functions of metaphysics in Kant with a systematic interest in the practical and practico-theoretical transformation of previously theoretical metaphysics in Kant, which morphs from a doctrine of the objects of nature through a doctrine of the laws of freedom to a doctrine of wisdom regarding the supersensible.
Highlights
The essay investigates the relation between metaphysics and practical philosophy in Kant by reconstructing Kant‘s systematic typology of metaphysics as developed in his critical writings
The focus here is on the epistemological turn effectuated by Kant with regard to metaphysics
The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) further systematizes the position and function of the postulatory metaphysics through the methodological concept of “matters of faith” designating the objects of a believing that is exercised at someone’s discretion (“free believing”), as opposed to theoretically cognizable “matters of fact” and to dogmatically prescribed “articles of faith.”116 The later yet extensive fragment on the progress of metaphysics adds to these methodological features of the metaphysics of postulates the designation of its practically-theoretically mixed mode of cognition as “practicodogmatic”
Summary
From early on and until the end, metaphysics stands at the center of Kant’s philosophical thinking. In the revirement that Kant’s project of metaphysics undergoes over the course of the 1780s — from the originally envisioned execution to the undertaken and successfully extended foundation — the extensional reorientation goes together with an intensional revision of metaphysics Given his skeptical assessment of all previous metaphysics and his critical attitude toward the overall possibility of metaphysics, Kant replaces the traditional fourfold metaphysics of general, psychic, cosmic and divine being by a meta-metaphysics („metaphysics about metaphysics“), which first and foremost asks and answers the question concerning the principal possibility of metaphysics. The second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), which follows the core conception of the Prolegomena (1785), distinguishes between metaphysics as an integral part of reason in its generally inquisitive and especially ground-seeking nature (“metaphysics as a natural disposition”) and metaphysics as a discipline brought under the forms and norms of methodically controlled cognition geared at certainty and truth (“metaphysics as a science”).. According to Kant, they consists in strictly scientific cognition under the guise of “infinite judgments,” according to which the tenets of “atheism” in rational theology, those of “materialism” in rational psychology and those of “fatalism” in rational cosmology are false and the corresponding metaphysical doctrinal positions of anti-atheism, anti-materialism and anti-fatalism ate to be considered scientifically established.
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