The New Philosophy

Abstract

Kant’s transcendental revolution temporarily cut through debates between Humian skeptics and rationalists of a Leibniz-Wolffian stripe. It established reason as an immanent tribunal, judging its possibilities and errors. Through an analysis of the structure of intuition and the deduction of the categories intrinsic to judgement, largely scientific, the edifice of the first Critique raised epistemology out of metaphysics and psychologism. Together, the Antimonies and Paralogisms of pure reason indicated the contradictions and misuse of concepts into which rational speculation had hitherto fallen. The paralogisms of the erstwhile rational psychology had argued in favor of the simplicity, substantiality, and the personality of the soul, thereby following a logic of substance and accidents where passions and affects were the latter, attaching to that soul. By showing the errors of the paralogisms, Kant effectively “dispatched” virtually all affects to his “science of man and the world,” the anthropology of human practice. However, the solution to Kant’s Paralogisms of the soul opened a new circle, such that our inner sense and its logical condition, transcendental apperception preceded, but could only be thought thanks to, the categories of understanding. At stake was the intrinsic unity of consciousness within the transcendental project. Although the Critique of Practical Reason retained a crucial intellectual affect, Achtung (attention and respect), Kant’s epistemology required clear distinctions between understanding, reason, and affects. In a sense, ontology and epistemology bifurcate into the domains of a transcendental approach to experience as representation and what lays outside it (including pre-reflective sensibility and affects).