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The Many Faces of Transcendental Realism: Willaschek on Kant’s Dialectic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Andrew Chignell
Andrew Chignell*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
*
Email: chignell@princeton.edu
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Abstract

After providing a brief overview of Marcus Willaschek's Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics, I critically reconstruct his account of ‘transcendental realism’ and the role that it plays in the dramatic narrative of the Critique of Pure Reason. I then lay out in detail how Willaschek generates and evaluates various versions of transcendental realism and raise some concerns about each. Next, I look at precisely how Willaschek's Kant thinks we can avoid applying the ‘supreme’ dialectical principle (for every conditioned there is a totality of conditions which is unconditioned) to the domain of appearances. Finally, I call into question Willaschek's efforts to appropriate the lessons of the Transcendental Dialectic without following Kant into transcendental idealism.

Keywords

KantCritique of Pure ReasonTranscendental Dialectictranscendental idealismmetaphysicscritique
Type
Author Meets
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 279 - 293
Copyright
© Kantian Review, 2020

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References

Notes

1 This statement is also slightly different from TRrationalism above. I am not sure whether anything important changes when we talk of principles rather than structure.

2 By this I mean any feature that is not dependent on a mind by its very concept – the way that ‘being thought about’ would be, for instance.

3 See my ‘Kant's One-World Phenomenalism: How the Moral Features Appear’, in K. Schafer and N. Stang (eds), The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

4 This is not to suggest, of course, that Descartes and Spinoza are not tempted to say something like this, at least about clear and distinct or accurate ideas. But in Chapter 9 Willaschek is operating for the most part in a contemporary context.