The conclusion summarizes what the main consequences of the book for out understanding of the critique of pure reason are. It also emphasizes that the understanding of the critique that it is proposed is not applicable to the second and third Critiques. In those works, Kant appears to have changed his mind concerning what the main taks of a critique of pure reason is.

In a passage in both editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes what he wants to accomplish there as a ‘doctrine of method’ (A82–3/B108–9). In the B-Preface, he adds that the Critique ‘is a treatise on the method’ (Bxxii). In this chapter, I argue that the best way to understand these claims is to see them as an indication that the Critique is the doctrine of method of metaphysics. I start by clarifying what a doctrine of method is for Kant and distinguish between the doctrine of method of general logic and the doctrines of method of particular sciences. In a second step, I argue that the Transcendental Doctrine of Method is the particular doctrine of method of metaphysics. Furthermore, I explain how this is compatible with regarding the whole Critique as the doctrine of method of metaphysics. Since cognitions belonging to a science must already be established in order for a doctrine of method to perform its task, the Transcendental Doctrine of Method requires that at least some doctrinal parts of metaphysics be established in the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. I argue that this has important consequences for how we should depict the relationship between the critique of pure reason and transcendental philosophy.

The introductions provides a presentation of the books main claims and an overview of the chapters.

The aim of this book is to explore the impact of the First World War on German philosophy through a series of analyses of the paths taken by central figures of the German 20th-century philosophical tradition in such a way that recognizes the complexity of the philosophical issues that animated their thinking, as well as the demands of wartime and its aftermath to which these thinkers responded: Hermann Cohen, Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Gyorgy Lukacs, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl

In late 1917, with the war having taken its grim toll on the student population drawn to the service of the Fatherland, after the collapse of General von Falkenhayn’s intended breakthrough at Verdun and the equally calamitous struggle on the Somme in 1916, with an increasingly deteriorating economic situation at the home front, resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and entry of the United States into the war, Edmund Husserl delivered three lectures on “Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity” at the University of Freiburg. The initiative for these lectures – “emergency wartime seminars” – came directly from the military High Command, most likely at the personal request of General Erich von Gündell, who had studied under Husserl in Göttingen before the war and was Commander General of the Reserve Corps (Fifth Army), in which Husserl’s two sons fought.

Tackles the two main issues of contention between Cassirer's and Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant. I first examine why Heidegger opposes his own ‘ontological reading’ of the first Critique to the ‘epistemological reading’ that he attributes to the Neo-Kantians. I clarify what this opposition entails and consider in what way it indeed applies to Cassirer (4.1). Next, I turn to Cassirer and Heidegger's more specific disagreement regarding the relevance of Kant's account of transcendental imagination. Remarkably, both thinkers not only value how this account attempts to undercut the artificial opposition between receptivity and spontaneity (4.2), but their agreement extends to the shared thesis that Kant ultimately did not succeed because he lacked a truly phenomenological method (4.3). Yet, Cassirer and Heidegger still radically part ways as soon as they evaluate why this (failed) attempt is so important: while Heidegger takes transcendental imagination as the ground of human reason’s finite nature, Cassirer concludes from the primacy of this faculty to the fundamentally spontaneous character of reason (4.4).

Retraces how Cassirer transforms Kant’s transcendental philosophy into a philosophy of culture in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. First, Cassirer abandons Kant’s notion of the category and instead models his conception of the symbol on the schema from The Critique of Judgment (2.1). Second, he understands such symbols as constituting not only the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic sphere, but all cultural domains, including myth, language, and the human sciences (2.2). This forces Cassirer to adopt two conceptions of objectivity: a constitutive conception that pertains to each cultural domain (or ‘symbolic forms’) and a regulative conception that befits human culture as a whole (2.3).

Argues that Heidegger considers all three elements of his own view of the ‘concept and method’ of philosophy – ontology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics – to be at work in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. First, Heidegger's well-known ‘ontological reading’ of this work more specifically interprets it as a treatise on the possibility of general ontology (3.1). Further, he understands Kant’s critical approach as an attempt at developing the phenomenological method that such an ontology requires (3.2). Ultimately and most audaciously, Heidegger interprets the changes between the two editions of the first Critique as the result of Kant’s hermeneutical reflection upon this attempt (3.3). This chapter puts forward a new reading of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (GA 3) and Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (GA 25), but also draws from What is a Thing? (GA 41), Logic: The Question of Truth (GA 21), and Einleitung in die Philosophie (GA 27).

The relation between Kantian transcendental philosophy and Jamesian pragmatism is both historically and systematically crucial for the conception of pragmatism and truth developed in the book. Chapter 3 first introduces the basic idea of "transcendental pragmatism" - the integration of pragmatist, or pragmatically naturalized, and Kantian-inspired transcendental arguments identifying conditions for the possibility of things we take to be actual in our practices - and then offers a critical comparison between some of Kant's and James's key ideas, especially elaborating on their pessimistic conception of the human being and suggesting that Jamesian empirical meliorism (as distinguished from both optimism and pessimism) needs to be built upon Kantian transcendental pessimism about the limits of the human condition. Based on this development of transcendental pragmatism, the relation between ethics and religion - analogous in Kant and James - is critically considered: if religion can only be based on ethics, we will have to ask whether (ethically) legitimate religious faith inevitably remains insincere.

The introduction summarizes overall argument unfolding through the six main chapters of the book and provides basic motivation for pursuing the pragmatist considerations of the volume. It emphasizes that the concept of truth may seem to have become seriously threatened in our culture - especially due to familiar political events and the active use of the social media today. As pragmatism, particularly Jamesian pragmatism, might be considered partly responsible for these developments, a novel critical exploration of pragmatist resources for dealing with the issues concerning the responsible pursuit of truth across a wide range of human practices is needed. The introduction also offers preliminary reasons why the argument of the book moves through a rather complex discussion of Kantian transcendental philosophy (and transcendental pragmatism) instead of merely "directly" utilizing the classical pragmatists' views on truth as such.

Our practices of pursuing the truth and engaging in ethical or existential commitments, analyzed from a pragmatist perspective in the previous chapters, are inherently normative. This chapter considers the transcendental question concerning the very possibility of normativity - that is, the possibility of our engaging in the normative practices we do engage in, including practices of truth-seeking presupposing individual ethical sincerity - from the point of view of a pragmatist transcendental philosophy (as developed in the earlier chapters). It is suggested that such a transcendental question about normativity belongs to philosophical anthropology, as it examines the most basic aspects of the human condition. It is argued that no contingent and naturalizable matters of fact, such as psychological acts of recognition, can adequately ground the possibility of normativity in the transcendental sense. A pragmatist commitment to sincerity thus also entails a commitment to irreducible (but not therefore mystical or supernatural) normativity. A pragmatic and transcendental form of humanism emerges as the only way of making sense of normativity in our lives and practices.

Chapter 3 addresses the relationship between the various tasks carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason by analyzing Kant’s multifaceted use of the term ‘transcendental.’ Challenging the received view, it maintains that Kant’s seemingly divergent accounts of the subject hinge on his conception of transcendental philosophy proper and transcendental critique as first-order and second-order branches of transcendental cognition, respectively. Drawing on a brief account of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of the term ‘transcendental,’ the chapter seeks to show that Wolffian ontology and transcendental philosophy proper have more in common than is widely assumed: both disciplines can be said to provide a comprehensive account of the cognitive elements presupposed in any cognition of objects. On this account, the novelty of the Critique consists primarily in the second-order investigation into metaphysics that Kant calls transcendental critique. The chapter concludes by examining Kant’s criticism of the way his predecessors and contemporaries understood the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘transcendental philosophy.’