Chapter 5 - Kant

Summary

Introduction

At this point in the narrative something extraordinary happens. What has gone before and what will come after are both largely to be understood in terms of what occurs here. Like the central node in a figure ‘X’, this point can be seen as a singularity that draws together the various strands above it and issues in those below.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was, like Leibniz, a philosophical eclectic. He made free and creative use of the various attempts at sense-making that other great philosophers had bequeathed to him, including some of the most general attempts that we have observed. But he did so in a way that was highly measured. It needed to be. Much of what had been bequeathed to him was in conflict with much else. The most distinctive feature of his eclecticism was the way in which he took rival systems of thought and rooted out inveterate assumptions that were common to them. On the one hand this enabled him to show that some of the fundamental points of controversy between them were ill-conceived. On the other hand it enabled him to salvage and to reconcile some of their apparently irreconcilable insights. In the process he in turn bequeathed a philosophical system of breathtaking depth and power. At the end of Chapter 1 I outlined a sense in which Spinoza was a post-Cartesian philosopher. In just the same sense, there would never be a great philosopher after this point who was not a post-Kantian philosopher.