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It is argued that the Antithesis of the third Antinomy, drawing on an argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason in excluding freedom, represents Spinozist metaphysics (not Leibnizian, as commonly is assumed). The fourth Antinomy’s account of the unconditioned is analyzedanalysed as well. It is argued that the argument Kant provides prefigures his later explicit statement, that if his own philosophy is denied, “nothing remains but Spinozism.“. Kant’s third Antinomy, the “‘Antinomy of Freedom‘,“ is confronted with Spinoza’s theory of freedom and adequate ideas. It is argued that Spinoza cannot legitimately draw on the notion of complete infinity (as he does) without begging the question to the Antinomy, for his theory of adequate ideas assumes the notion of complete infinity.

Chapter 5 specifies the precise but silent moment in which Deleuze breaks with Spinoza. For Spinoza, affectus refers to an individual’s passage or (in Deleuze’s terms) ‘becoming’ between two states. Deleuze generalises and radicalises this idea of becoming such that it no longer takes place between two states of one individual but, rather, between two heterogenous individuals. The gesture makes Deleuze both more and less traditional than the tradition. As what takes place between individuals, on the one hand, Deleuze gives affect an autonomy that would be unthinkable in the philosophical tradition according to which sensations derive from and belong to a pre-existent being. On the other hand, however, the same affective autonomy remains complicit with the tradition in a way neglected by Deleuze and influential commentators: Deleuze dematerializes and disembreduces, affect ends up suppressing the bodyodies affect in order to render it autonomous. In light of which, however, I do not simply unearth grounds on which to question Deleuze’s materialism. It is not even enough to say Deleuze is less materialist than the most ideal philosopher. Purely idealist readings miss a more brutal consequence. Namely, because Deleuze also recognizes the irreducibility of the materiality that he reduces, affect ends up suppressing the body again and again ad infinitum.

Kant’s denial, in his Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, of the possibility of a Newton of the Blade of Grass is often cited as evidence that Kant rejects the possibility of biology as causal science altogether. Kant’s denial is then treated as symptomatic of the irrelevance, for contemporary biology and philosophy of biology, of Kant’s teleological views in the second half of his Critique of the Power of Judgment. But when Kant’s denial is considered in its proper context—namely, as a re-formulation of the antithesis position of Kant’s antinomy of the teleological power of judgment—a more nuanced picture emerges. Kant embraces both the necessity and sufficiency of causal (mechanistic) explanations for an account of the corporeal reality of organic nature. But Kant denies the sufficiency of causal (mechanistic) explanations for an account of the totality of our phenomenal awareness of organic nature.

Chapter 5 tests the proposal that it was Hume’s attack on the principle of sufficient reason that first interrupted Kant’s dogmatic slumber and set Kant on the path to the Critique by looking, in the Critique, for echoes of Enquiry 12.29 note (d). It finds such echoes in the Transcendental Ideal, the Postulates of Empirical Thought, the Analogies of Experience, and the Antinomy of Pure Reason. It seeks to explain how Enquiry 12.29 note (d) might have helped suggest the solution to the Antinomy, transcendental idealism. It discusses Boehm’s view that the Antinomy is a reply to Spinoza. Kant is indeed responding to Spinoza, but also to Clarke; his response to both is inspired by Hume.

This chapter introduces a constellation of thinkers who had a major influence on Fichte: Kant, Reinhold, and Maimon. It begins with Kant’s effort to defend the coexistence of freedom and causal mechanism, leading up to his thesis that a free will and a will under moral laws are ‘reciprocal concepts.’ Reinhold criticizes this thesis on the grounds that it renders free yet immoral action impossible, and he proposes a new definition of freedom as our capacity to choose between our ‘selfish drive’ and our ‘unselfish drive.’ However, as Maimon observes, this new definition gives rise to the question of what, if anything, determines the agent to act one way or the other. The solution Fichte proposes in §10 of the System of Ethics comes in the form of his Genetic Model of freedom: the idea that indeterminacy and determinacy of choice are but stages in the emergence of freedom.

This chapter addresses Florovsky’s interpretation of the sources and norms of neopatristic theology, more specifically, scripture, tradition, divine revelation, and ecclesial experience. Florovsky draws on the insights of Aleksei Khomiakov’s epistemology of sobornost’, in which knowledge acquisition depends on the community of knowers bounded by love. Florovsky developed a version of social epistemology of the catholic transformation by ecclesial and Eucharistic participation. Florovsky’s use of different modalities of theological reasoning, especially his appeal to intuition and the antinomic character of religious knowledge, is discussed.

This chapter explains the role of the master argument (described in Chapter 10) in Kant’s critiques of rational psychology (in the “Paralogisms”) and rational cosmology (in the “Antinomy”). In rational psychology, metaphysical reason fallaciously infers the existence of a substantial soul from conceptual considerations about the “merely logical” version of the “I think.” In rational cosmology, metaphysics claims to represent the world-whole as a definite, singular, unconditioned object by merely conceptual means, but Kant argues that those strictly analytic resources are unequal to the task. In both cases, the crucial consideration driving Kant’s conclusion is the basic result of the mater argument (Chapter 10)—namely, that merely analytic relations among concepts cannot suffice to establish the existence of, or definite singular reference to, objects.

It is argued that the Antithesis of the first Antinomy, drawing on an argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason in arguing that the world is infinite (rather than indefinite) in space and uncreated in time, presents Spinozist metaphysics. Spinoza’s challenge to the argument of the antinomy, drawing on a cosmological totum analyticum, is considered. A Kantian reply is initially elaborated, drawing on Kant’s claim that the notion of the infinite (rather than the indefinite) can be vindicated only through an experience of freedom. The connection between infinity and freedom in the third Critique’s account of the sublime turns out as crucial to understanding the Antinomies.