PART II - CAUSALITY IN THE CRITICAL PERIOD
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
Summary
There is no doubt that the “Critical turn” initiated by the Critique of Pure Reason (and completed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment) represents a truly revolutionary achievement in philosophy, one that must have far-reaching consequences for Kant's views on causality just as they do for any of his other major philosophical doctrines. It is, to be sure, true that certain aspects of the Critique are anticipated in his pre-Critical period; as we saw in Chapter 2, the Inaugural Dissertation develops the Transcendental Aesthetic's insight that space and time are merely subjective principles of the sensible world and draws a distinction between the sensible and intelligible worlds (even if Kant's later distinction between reason and the understanding is not yet present). And Kant's view that we can have nothing more than merely “symbolic cognition” of the intelligible world is perhaps not far from the Critique's outright denial that we can have any substantive knowledge of things in themselves. However, most of the major sections of the Critique are not present at all in the his pre-Critical period: the Preface (along with the idea of restricting knowledge in order to make room for faith), the Introduction's powerful reflections on synthetic a priori knowledge, the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions, the Schematism, much of the Analytic of Principles (including the Amphiboly chapter), virtually all of the Transcendental Dialectic's specific arguments in the Paralogisms and Antinomies, and the rich considerations developed in the Doctrine of Method.
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- Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality , pp. 181 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004