Abstract
Kant famously criticizes Leibniz for his apparent neglect to observe the difference between two sources of cognition: understanding and intuition. This is the reason that Leibniz supposedly intellectualized the phenomena by identifying them with things in themselves. In Kantian terms, Leibniz fell prey to an amphiboly of concepts which, in the case of his understanding of substance, has led him to assume monads—that is to say, ideal unities which exist in a state of pre-established harmony; for this is the only possible form of community between ideal substances. Distinct versions of this argument can be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, notably in the notoriously difficult passage entitled “On the amphiboly of concepts of reflections”, and in some later writings, such as the Kantian reply to the self-declared Leibnizian Johann August Eberhard (On a Discovery whereby any New Critique of Pure Reason is to be made Superfluous by an Older One, from 1790) or the late fragment What Real Progress has Metaphysics made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (originally from 1793, but published post mortem in 1804).
Highlights
This paper is devoted to the Kantian critique of Leibnizian metaphysics provided in the so-called amphiboly chapter of Kant’s Critique of pure Reason
To quote again the passage from the amphiboly, the absolutely inner turns out to be “a mere fancy” since there is nothing absolutely inner in space and time,[63] whereas the outer determinations have lost their problematic character, because space “already contains in itself a priori formal outer relations as conditions of the possibility of the real”. It is a great merit in the work of both Langton and Watkins to call attention to the importance of the Leibnizian tradition in which Kant’s thought stands and from which his philosophical development emerged. Langton considers this relationship mainly with respect to Kant’s understanding of the thing in itself and substance, or, in Kantian terms, the question of the inner nature of substance, whereas Watkins concentrates on the causality of substance
Both eventually appear to have fallen prey to a similar mistake—namely, not taking seriously enough Kant’s critical turn, and in particular the essential role he attributes to the transcendental aesthetics. This means for Langton that she uncritically identified things in themselves with Kant’s pre-critical view on inner determinations of substance, while Watkins, on the other hand, imported Kant’s pre-critical understanding of ground into the First Critique, notably the Second and Third Analogy
Summary
In her reconstruction of what she takes to be Kant’s path to transcendental idealism—or, in her terms, Kantian humility—Langton proceeds, somewhat surprisingly for many readers, from Kant’s critical assessment of Leibniz found in the amphiboly section of the Critique of Pure Reason. It is not surprising that modern commentators ask why Kant thinks that internal properties should be causally inefficacious and why he did not conceive of the inner as some sort of causal disposition, analogous to positions found in contemporary debate.[32] Against the background of the post-Leibnizian discussion, it becomes apparent that, for Kant, purely inner determinations of a simple substance can only be conceived of as ideal: if one takes the inner to consist of mental presentations, it makes no sense to assume that there is some immediate influence on other ideal substances It remains open what the modified Kantian concept of substance amounts to and how it relates to the pre-critical features Langton mentioned.
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