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9 - The Paralogisms of Pure Reason

from Part II - The Arguments of the Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2010

Paul Guyer
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

After analyzing our cognitive powers of sensibility and understanding in the first Critique's Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic and arguing that these powers can together yield synthetic a priori knowledge, albeit knowledge limited to objects of appearance, Kant turns to an analysis of the power of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic. Here the outcome is far more negative. Kant identifies many ways in which reason oversteps its bounds, and repeatedly charges the rationalists with such errors. At the same time, he is empathetic toward the rationalists, underscoring that their errors are not obvious or even disingenuous, as the overly simplistic empiricists hold, but instead deep and inevitable, grounded in transcendental confusions that only Kant's transcendental researches can identify if not eradicate. In the first of the Dialectic's three chapters, the “Paralogisms of Reason,” Kant's focus is the rationalists' errors in the field of psychology. The sole purpose for the rationalists' ventures in psychology, Kant repeatedly tells us, is to establish the immortality of the soul. Toward this end, he believes, they need to establish three things about the soul: its permanence, incorruptibility, and personality. So how do they argue for these conclusions? They don't. Instead, Kant thinks they argue for the conclusions of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, and identity. They then simply assume that these conclusions entail permanence, incorruptibility, and personality.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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