Transcendental Proofs in the Critique of Pure Reason

Abstract

It is one of the effects caused by the critical philosophy, that metaphysics qua ontology and qua ‘metaphysica specialis’ has suffered discredit. Even the metaphysical systems of ‘German Idealism’ are, according to how they were understood by their authors, rooted in Kant’s insight, that ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics is impossible. When, in Germany around the end of the 19th century, neo-Kantianism arose, the essence of Kant’s critical philosophy was supposed to be its intrinsic connection with the natural sciences, especially Newtonian physics. The Critique of Pure Reason no longer found any interest as a systematic critique of all possible attempts to know the suprasensible, or as an attempt to rescue freedom of the will, which was seen as indispensible to morals. It was taken even less seriously as a destruction of a deductive ontology of the type of Christian Wolff. The effect of the first critique was so overwhelming that it has almost become commonplace to see the foundation of everyday or scientific experience as the proper task of theoretical philosophy. Had not Kant taught that all (theoretical) knowledge lies within the limits of actual or possible experience and that our concepts, including the mathematical ones, could not possibly have any sense and meaning, if the range of possible experience was left behind? He seemed to anticipate with this the fundamental thesis of Vienna Circle positivism, which was that every nonanalytic sentence which cannot be verified or falsified by experience is simply without significance.