Phenomenology of time-consciousness underwrites Dante’s entire experience of the letters appearing successively to him in the Heaven of Jupiter and forming a whole only in his mental synthesis of their event. Dante takes the “I” as organizing framework and originary principle of the poem. But this I and the poem itself are put forward as mediations of a higher being, that of God. The situation is thus fundamentally different from that in modern phenomenological tradition, where the “I” as mediation of otherness is centered in itself rather than in a divine Other. The self in the perspective of Dante’s poem is a structure serving to relate to God as the absolute Other rather than simply encompassing all possible reality within its own parameters. Whereas in modern philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, otherness has typically been comprehended as no more than a detour back to self and thus as an indirect mode of self-relation, we need to stand this insight on its head (or turn it inside out) in order to see things from Dante’s perspective. Not the I, but God, is the ground and principle in Dante’s theocentric world-view. The reality of the “I” is derivative: it consists of being “made in God’s image.”

Chapter 7 analyzes the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic entitled “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.” Using Leibniz’s monadology as a prism, Kant here seeks to account for the ultimate premises of his critique and intended reform of metaphysics. More specifically, the chapter conceives of this critique as a variety of transcendental reflection that is guided by four pairs of concepts, including sameness and difference. In order to contextualize this account, the chapter briefly discusses Wolff’s and Baumgarten’s treatment of these concepts. Commentators generally assume that the activity called transcendental reflection is carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason alone. The chapter argues, by contrast, that Kant distinguishes the version of transcendental reflection that informs the ontology of his predecessors from the critical version enacted in the Critique. On this basis, it outlines Kant’s understanding of the difference between a Leibnizian employment of the concepts of reflection and his own.