In what may be his single most famous passage, the first sentence of which was even inscribed on his tombstone, Immanuel Kant concluded his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) thus:

BACKGROUND

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Lutheran theology had become an ossified and sterile orthodoxy. It was challenged by two currents of thought that were to lead to the eighteenth-century German Enlightenment. The first was Pietism, founded by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705). The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of doctrinal propositions but a living relationship with God. They stressed above all the felt power of God's grace to transform the believer's life through a conversion of “born again” experience. Pietism was hostile to the intellectualization of Christianity. Like Lutheran orthodoxy it exalted scriptural authority above natural reason, but for Pietism the main purpose of reading scripture was inspiration and moral edification. The experience of spiritual rebirth must transform the believer's emotions and show itself in outward conduct. Within the universities, the Pietists favored cultivation of piety and morality in life rather than theoretical inquiry. In religious controversy, they urged that the aim should be to win over the heart of one's opponent rather than to gain intellectual victory.

Although Kant never developed a theoretical psychology of his own, he discussed psychological topics throughout his life. These discussions ranged from early, brief remarks on mind-body interaction in the True Estimation of Living Forces (§§5-6, 1:20-1) of 1747 to the relatively late, extended treatment of the faculties of cognition in the Anthropology, published from Kant's lecture notes under his supervision in 1797. In his lectures on metaphysics, from the 1760s onward, he followed common practice and regularly discussed what he and his contemporaries called “empirical” and “rational” psychology (records of these lectures survive through student notes: 28:59- 122, 221-301, 583-94, 670-90, 735-75, 849-74, 886-906). And in the preface to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) he examined the question of whether empirical psychology could ever achieve a scientific status like that of physics, notoriously answering that it could not (4:471). For our purposes, however, the central problems pertaining to Kant's relation to psychology arise in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the Critique Kant distinguished his philosophical aim from that of empirical psychology. He also investigated the possibility of empirical and especially of rational psychology. In addition, and problematically, he adopted, even in the avowedly philosophical portions of the work, an implicitly psychological vocabulary. Because of his extensive use of this vocabulary, interpreters have, from the instant of the Critique's publication, disputed the extent to which Kant rested his arguments on psychological ground.

In the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant wrote:

However, the initial response to Kant's argument, which he also titled the “transcendental deduction of the categories”(A 85 /B 117), was largely one of incomprehension, and in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, Kant himself acknowledged that precisely “that part of the Critique which should have been the clearest was the most obscure, or even revolved in a circle” (4:474 n.).So in the second edition of the Critique, published the following year, Kant completely rewrote the transcendental deduction. He claimed that this revision touched only the manner of “presentation,” not the “propositions themselves and their grounds of proof” (B xxxvii-xxxviii). But in spite of Kant's efforts at clarification, the intervening two centuries have brought little agreement in the interpretation of the deduction, even on the fundamental question of whether the two editions of the Critique, in 1781 and 1787, try to answer the same question by means of the same argument. The last three decades alone have brought forth dozens of competing interpretations or “reconstructions” of Kant's transcendental deduction.

Kant's attitude toward metaphysics and ontology is ambiguous in his Critical work. On the standard view of the Critique of Pure Reason, the positive and negative aspects of this attitude map neatly onto the two major sections of that work. After that first section presents a “Transcendental Analytic” of the understanding, or a “metaphysics of experience,” which legitimates the use of certain pure concepts necessary for structuring our spatiotemporal knowledge, a Transcendental Dialectic is provided to expose fallacies that theoretical reason entangles itself in when it extends itself beyond experience. Just prior to that Dialectic, Kant also inserts an “Appendix” on “concepts of reflection” that sketches how the restriction of our use of pure concepts to the domain of experience limits the general claims of the traditional ontology of the Leibnizian system. These attacks would appear to complement each other. Whereas the specific errors of rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology are exposed in the core of the Dialectic, the critique of ontology and the general discussions of the operations of “reflection”and “reason” suggest a principle of closure for dismissing all claims of our theoretical reason that would stray beyond a merely immanent spatiotemporal field.

The Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason has three main sections: the Metaphysical Deduction, the Transcendental Deduction, and the Analytic of Principles. The second and third sections have spawned much lively controversy, both interpretive and substantive. The first, by contrast, has generated little interest. Most readers have thought it clear what Kant means to establish here, and how. Most have also thought it plain that his argument is a failure, unworthy of continued exploration.

I will not try to defend the argument of the Metaphysical Deduction. I will try to show that this section of the Critique contains material of considerable importance, however. First I will summarize Kant's argument (I) and review some of the difficulties with it (II). Then I will discuss the notion of synthesis, trying to show that the Metaphysical Deduction helps to shed light on this important but otherwise obscure notion (III). Finally, I will comment briefly on the central contention of the Metaphysical Deduction (IV).

The literature on Kant, as might be expected from both the range of his work and his centrality in the history of modern philosophy, is enormous. The following bibliography is necessarily selective. In view of the aims of the present series, it focuses on recent books and collections of articles, although including some older works that have attained classical status. Only very important articles that have not been republished in collections by their authors or anthologies have been listed separately; individual articles in collections that are included are not listed separately. The bibliography also emphasizes works in English, although some of the most important works in German and a few in French have been included. Books that include especially extensive bibliographies are noted. Further bibliographical information can be found in the bibliographical surveys by Rudolf Maker that have been published since 1969 in Kant-Studien, the official journal of the Kant-Gesellschaft. More recently, bibliographical surveys prepared by Manfred Kuehn have been published in the newsletter of the North American Kant Society. An annotated bibliography on Kant's ethics is Kantian Ethical Thought: A Curhcular Report and Annotated Bibliography(Tallahassee: Council for Philosophical Studies, 1984).

CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT

With the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant completed his critical enterprise. To this day, however, the third of his three Critiques has remained the darkest of Kant;s published works and the most inaccessible to the philosophical reader. Its two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment, are bracketed together by a formidable Introduction - two, in fact: one usually referred to as the First Introduction, and the shorter one Kant substituted for it for publication. Both introductions are relentlessly technical, both rehearse the Kantian scheme as a whole, drawing and redrawing well-known and new distinctions and contrasts; both address themselves to “philosophy as a system” They see the third Critique as a culmination and completion of critical philosophy, now enlarged in scope and thus requiring a number of retrospective adjustments to earlier projections of the architectonics of the entire edifice.

Defining the limits of a historical period always entails an element of arbitrariness. There are good reasons, however, for setting the conclusion of the first cycle in the reception of Kant's critical program at August 7, 1799, just under twenty years after the first appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason. The date marks the publication of Kant's open letter in which he repudiated Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and other attempts at bringing his transcendental philosophy to completion. His own critical work, which in the Critique he had claimed to be only of an introductory nature (A 11 / B 25), he now declared to constitute the system of pure reason itself. From that date onward the very reception of Kant became a problem, itself the subject of interpretation and reception. Moreover, at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had predicted that, following the path laid out by his program, one could “secure for human reason complete satisfaction” in regard to all its metaphysical preoccupations, and that this goal could be achieved “before the end of the present century” (A 856 / B 884).