2 - The Inaugural Dissertation

Summary

In the Dreams, Kant appealed to the notion of delusion in order to limit material knowledge claims to objects (data) given to our senses. In line with this, the possibility of acquiring any metaphysical knowledge of reality was bracketed off, at least until such time as the relation between the conceptions at issue and the cognitive capacities could be established. This last project is again taken up in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. In the Dissertation, however, the possibility of acquiring metaphysical knowledge of reality is explicitly left open, and the theory of illusion is developed as part of a methodological procedure designed to avoid the errors presumably generated by incorrectly applying sensitive conditions to objects of pure reason. This method is thus supposed to provide a means of avoiding metaphysical errors without denying the possibility of a nonfallacious metaphysics. In yet another letter to Lambert (Sept. 2, 1770), Kant describes the problem as follows:

The most universal laws of sensibility play an unjustifiably large role in metaphysics, where, after all, it is merely concepts and principles [Grundsätze] of pure reason that are at issue. A quite special, though purely negative science, general phenomenology [phaenomologia generalis], seems to me to be presupposed by metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as has heretofore almost always happened. […]