Abstract
James Van Cleve's Problems from Kant is the most up-to-date, challenging, and extensive study of the Critique of Pure Reason now available from a thoroughly analytic perspective. It covers most of the major topics in the theoretical core of Kant's main work and offers bold defenses of several syn thetic a priori claims. It also reinforces a growing interpretive trend that stresses limits in Kant's fabled critiques of rationalist claims, especially in the Dialectic. The arguments of Van Cleve's Kant point on balance (on purely theoretical grounds) toward two worlds, ultimate simple entities, double affection, hardcore metaphysical realism on truth, and the thesis that only noumena are genuine substances (120); substantial souls and a necessary being are not asserted but classical proofs for them remain unrefuted. Problems from Kant is distinctive in the way that it combines the crisp and often extremely critical style of argumentation found in Jonathan Bennett's work (developed in the verificationist heyday of the 1960s) with a very helpful grasp of the much more metaphysical character of the leading trends in current systematic philosophy. Although the book defends a phenomenalist reading of Kant's transcendental idealism that is not far from Bennett's empiricist interpretation, it also stresses many points that derive mostly from a philosophical and interpretative sympathy for the rationalist tradition and a revival of modal considerations in the spirit of David Lewis and Alvin Plantinga (and against the likes of Putnam and Dummett). Since there is not enough room here to go into the many points on which I very much agree with the rationalist side of Van Cleve's reading,1 I will take this occasion to play the role of critic and concentrate on one of the few areas in
Published Version
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