Search Results

Chapter 1 is about ideas: it shows their importance, neglected by the literature as well as by Kant himself at various stages of his thought, and their difference from concepts. This chapter focuses on the relation between ideas and limits and shows the importance of the latter, which is often misunderstood as simply negative. It shows a tension between two images of reason to be found in the Architectonic: reason as a seed from which an organism grows internally as a systematically articulated unity, and reason as an architect who plans the edifice of reason’s laws. This tension reflects the two mirror sides of ideas. They are both a totalizing drive based on reason’s need to project a whole as a unitary scope for its objects and a necessary guide for reason’s activities. Chapter 1 shows the necessity of a comprehensive gaze that only the philosopher can aspire to. Failing this we are (in an image used by Kant) like Cyclopes.

Explores the role of metaphysics in Peirce's philosophy and discusses some themes in Karl Otto Apel's interpretation of his thought. Apel claims that Peirce's is a sort of transcendental philosophy, that he defended ‘transcendental semiotic’. The chapter challenges Apel's claim, arguing that Peirce rejected transcendental arguments, claiming that at best they establish that we are justified in hoping that their conclusions are true. It is argued that the role of Peirce's metaphysics in his philosophy is to provide a general scientific account of what the world must be like for the regulative ideas or hopes adopted in logic to be absolutely true. It concludes with a discussion of how metaphysical ideas provide guidance in constructing hypotheses in science.

For Hegel, Kant’s attack on the theological proofs in the First Critique has discredited the entire project of proving God’s existence. It now counts as the highest philosophical insight that theological cognition is not even possible. Even theologians have accepted this issue as settled. Theology is left with nothing but subjective feelings. This is the death of God. Hegel does not accept this situation, and calls Kant’s philosophy into question: for example, the instrumental metaphor for cognition, the metacritical question concerning the possibility of critical philosophy itself; the transcendental dialectic of the First Critique. Hegel identified an oscillation in Kant’s negative dialectic, between an empirical view of reason (understanding) and an idealist view of reason. The former grasps everything as distinct and separate, the latter grasps the whole, but its concepts are not constitutive, but only regulative, heuristic for our knowledge. The regulative view of ideas is Kant’s compromise between the empirical view and the idealist view of reason. To Hegel, Kant’s compromise is problematic: how can the ideas regulate our cognition of the world if they are in no sense constitutive or objective? If the regulative ideas are true only subjectively, they fail to regulate. But if they are true objectively, then they are the metaphysics Kant wants to avoid. Similar issues surface in Kant’s Second Critique: the ideas of reason become postulates of moral action. But they are valid only for practical purposes and do not provide cognition of the supersensible. They possess only subjective validity. They express the faith that what the moral law commands can be realized, i.e., that ought implies can. This philosophy of the “ought” is for Kant the highest possible resolution of the contradictions of reason. But an infinite that only ought to be is a finite, spurious infinite. Hegel sublates its dualism in the ontological proof and true infinite.

This chapter explores Kant’s account of the empirical laws of nature and the systematic unity they generate. How, if at all, can the particular laws of nature be both necessary and known empirically? And what, if any, is the cognitive function of the regulative idea of systematic unity for our knowledge of the laws? It is argued that, on Kant’s account, empirical reflection on particular phenomena can give us access to the laws insofar as this reflection is guided by the a priori laws of nature and the regulative idea of systematic unity. Reflection of this kind cannot ground scientific knowledge in the strict sense of the term, but it can lead to a common form of our knowledge of the laws.

A discussion of Peirce's claim that belief has no place in science and his views of the different roles of rational self‐control in dealing with scientific matters and with ‘vital questions’. This appears to be in conflict with Peirce's defence of the scientific method as the best method for the fixation of belief. There is also discussion of Peirce's claim that the laws of logic are regulative ideas, or hopes.