Powers of Pure Reason
Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy
"The Critique of Pure Reason" – Kant's First Critique – is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant's oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, "The Powers of Pure Reason" explores forgotten parts of the First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant's works.
Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique – the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique's greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself.
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Of Kings, Carters, and Palimpsests
2".Every division presupposes a concept that is to be divided" (KrV A 290/B 346). On Kant's Dichotomies
3. Reason's Finitude. Concepts and Ideas
4. Reason and Its Awakening
5. An Overview of the Book
Chapter One
The Architectonic and the Cosmic Concept of Philosophy
1. Reason's Needs, Interests, Dissatisfaction
2. Of Edifices and Organisms
3a. Ideas. Reason's Internal Articulation
3b. Ideas. Regulative Ideas and Empirical Cognition
3c. Ideas. The Idea of System
4. A Comprehensive Gaze: The Cyclops and the Cosmic Philosopher
5. Philosophy as an Idea. Reason's History
6. Cosmic Philosophy
7. A Final Look at Ends and Wisdom
8. An Attempt at Interpretation
Chapter Two
A Priori Synthesis
1. A Productive Reason
2. Form, Synthesis, and Intuition. On Blindness
3a. A Priori Synthesis. The Speculative Synthesis
3b. A Priori Synthesis. The Practical Synthesis
4. Mathematics and Metaphysics
5. Mathematical, Empirical, and Pure Concepts
6. The A Priori
7a. The Relative Independence of Intuition. Judgments of Perception and Judgments of Experience
7b. The Relative Independence of Intuition. Pure Intuition
7c. The Relative Independence of Intuition. We Are All Savages
Chapter Three
Kant on Kant
1. Science and Knowledge. The Combination Thesis
2. The Synthetic Knowledge of Transcendental Philosophy
3. Metaphysics, Critical and Transcendental Philosophy
4. Kant's Retrospective Judgments on the Critique of Pure Reason. The Interrelation of Faculties Recast
5. The A and B Prefaces to the First Critique. A Destitute Queen and the So-Called "Copernican Revolution"
6. The New Conception of Reason and the Power of Judgment
Conclusion
1. What Is a Faculty? The Facticity of Reason
2. In Closing
Appendix: On Schematized Categories: An Antinomy
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Alfredo Ferrarin is professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa. He is the author or editor of several books, including "Hegel and Aristotle".
Reviews
"Ferrarin has written a remarkable study of Kant's philosophy as a unified whole. It is challenging, daring, complex, erudite, detailed, and carefully argued, opening up new vistas on the meaning of Kant's critical enterprise. It is a major contribution to the scholarship" – Richard Velkley, author of "Freedom and the End of Reason"
"In this highly original and thoughtful book, Ferrarin succeeds in revitalizing in a very convincing way an approach to Kant's philosophy in all its different aspects, which he rightly takes to be practiced already by Kant's immediate successors, the German idealists. This approach is characterized by the compelling belief in the validity of the hermeneutical maxim that before one can have an adequate understanding of the disparate parts, one has to have a clear grasp of the guiding problem the philosophical project wants to answer. Ferrarin – in an almost Hegelian spirit – identifies questions pertaining to the authority of reason as the central clue to both Kant's metaphysical and moral views, and he gives a fascinating and extremely well-informed account of how the quest for reason's powers organizes all of Kant's philosophical work" – Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt University of Berlin
"Ferrarin's stimulating book undertakes a comprehensive investigation of Kant's conception of reason and the various roles it plays within his distinctive notion of philosophy. Drawing on the final chapters of the Doctrine of Method as well as a wide range of texts from throughout Kant's corpus with unusual textual sensitivity, it perceptively and imaginatively draws out the complex relations between reason (as an organism and as an architect), systematicity, and a priori synthesis, noting both the consistencies and tensions that emerge" – Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego
