What is Kant good for? Making sense of the diversity in the reception of Kant's philosophical method

One cannot be wrong when one says that Kant has been one of the most influential figures in the history of philosophy. His influence on later debates stretches over a multiplicity of fields of philosophical inquiry, such as epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics and its critique, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. The breadth of this influence is further confirmed by its lack of limits in space and its persistence over time. Arguably, there have been thinkers that could be labelled as ‘Kantians’ in every region of the planet. Similarly, during the time that separates us from Kant, there have certainly been times when Kant's views were more popular and times in which the interest in those views diminished. However, it cannot be said that the importance of Kant has gradually diminished as time has passed. Rather, Kant's views have regularly been ‘rediscovered’ in different historical periods and today there are still many philosophers who would describe themselves as Kantians.¹

Given the breadth of Kant's influence, it is no surprise that there are already many studies that address the significance of his views in other historical periods. These studies normally focus on a particular tradition. Leaving aside works that address the reception of Kant in a single philosopher, there are investigations of Kant's reception in German idealism (e.g. Sedgwick, The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy; Beiser, German Idealism; Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel; Horstmann, ‘The Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in German Idealism’; Förster, Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie), neo-Kantianism (e.g. Ferrari, Introduzione al neocriticismo; Heinz and Krijnen, Kant im Neukantianismus; Pollok, ‘The “Transcendental Method”’; Gigliotti, ‘Neokantismo’; Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880), phenomenology (e.g. Gorner, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations of Kant in Husserl and Heidegger’; Dahlstrom, ‘The Critique of Pure Reason and Continental Philosophy’; Besoli, ‘Fenomenologia’), hermeneutics (Camera, ‘Ermeneutica’), pragmatism (e.g. Murphey, ‘Kant's Children’; Gava and Stern, Pragmatism, Kant and Transcendental Philosophy), logical positivism (Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism; Friedman, Dynamics of Reason), and analytic philosophy (e.g. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy; O'Shea, ‘Conceptual Connections’; Westphal, ‘Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Analytic Philosophy’; Ferrari, ‘Filosofia Analitica’).²

There are, of course, good reasons that motivate the restricted scope of these studies. One is merely pragmatic: one cannot hope to offer a complete survey of all the ways in which Kant's thought has proven important for later philosophers. As a consequence of this, one needs to find a criterion of selection among the various receptions, where traditions offer a clearly identifiable one. Another reason is that it is much easier to tell a coherent story over these various receptions when one focuses on one tradition. So, for example, one can reconstruct the development of German idealism by showing how the figures belonging to this tradition all tried to provide an answer to the same problems arising from Kant (see Beiser, German Idealism; Förster, Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie). Something similar might be said when one focuses on either phenomenology, pragmatism or analytic philosophy.

Things are different when one does not consider a single tradition, but tries to compare how Kant was interpreted in different schools of thought. When one proceeds this way, it is much more difficult to obtain a coherent and unitary picture. Take German idealism and pragmatism. While both traditions took issue with Kant's distinctions between appearances and things in themselves, or between phenomena and noumena, they tried to overcome Kant's dualism in opposite directions: on the one hand, German idealists tried to show that the significance of Kant's work lies in his hints towards what he placed beyond the limits of experience; on the other, pragmatists radicalized the idea that we cannot have any knowledge of what is beyond possible experience and argued that there is simply nothing beyond those bounds. Take also phenomenology and analytic philosophy. While Kant's remarks on the imagination are central to philosophers belonging to the former tradition, these remarks are often set aside as obscure and unimportant by analytic philosophers. Therefore, there is an important gap that needs to be filled in the literature on the reception of Kant's thought: only very few studies have tried to make sense of the diversity among the interpretations and appropriations of Kant in different philosophical traditions.³

The aim of this special issue is twofold. First, it aims to provide an overview of the variety of Kant's influence on different traditions. Second, it attempts to make sense of this variety and to understand how very different interpretations could have arisen from a reading of a single philosopher. Of course, the special issue cannot focus on each and every aspect of Kant's thought that has proved important for philosophers after him. Rather, it concentrates its attention on Kant's views on the methodology of philosophical inquiry. The reasons behind this choice are mainly three. First, Kant's philosophical methodology is arguably one of the most innovative aspects of his thought. As a consequence of this, Kant's influence on later philosophers often involved, at least partially, an influence on the methodology of the figures in question. Appeals to ‘transcendental deductions’, the ‘critical method’ or the so-called ‘Copernican revolution’ are just some examples that demonstrate how his influence often took the form of a methodological transformation.⁴ Second, focusing on methodology allows one to more easily compare the views of philosophers that, at least from a superficial point of view, have little in common. This is possible because one can set aside the particular substantive issues on which the philosophers in question worked and concentrate one's attention on the approach they advocated. Third, plausibly, the methodology pursued by a philosopher has effects on their overall views in a way that a particular substantive claim they make is unlikely to have. In this way, by focusing on Kant's influence on the methodology of different philosophers, one can illuminate where this influence touches on very basic and far reaching aspects of their approach.

When one investigates the influence of Kant's philosophical methodology, one finds the same diversity and variety that I emphasized in speaking of his influence in general. Accordingly, different philosophical traditions have emphasized aspects of Kant's methodological approach that could seem incompatible – for example, the analysis of the antinomic conflict of reason with itself by the German idealists and the regulative use of reason by the pragmatists. Moreover, philosophers belonging to different traditions have sometimes proposed interpretations of the same aspect of Kant's line of argument that, at least on a superficial reading, seem completely opposed: for example, neo-Kantians like Hermann Cohen have understood Kant's transcendental method as a strategy for the foundation of the natural sciences, whereas analytic philosophers like Peter Strawson and Barry Stroud have interpreted Kant's transcendental arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason as providing a refutation of scepticism.⁵ The value of the special issue lies first of all in presenting a concise but wide-ranging survey of the multiplicity of receptions of Kant's philosophical method. The traditions that are taken into account are German idealism, neo-Kantianism, pragmatism, British idealism, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy.

However, the special issue does not simply place a series of studies dealing with the interpretations and appropriations of Kant's method in different traditions next to one another. Each and every article directly addresses problems that arise from the diversity among these receptions. The challenge of making sense of this diversity involves at first three tasks. First, there is the issue of directly comparing the views of those philosophers who present apparently opposed interpretations of Kant's method. In this respect, one needs to understand exactly where the views in question part their ways. The comparison might at the end highlight deeper continuities between apparently opposed interpretations. Second, as apparently opposed interpretations can conceal deeper continuities, philosophers that seem to share the same basic approach as far as their ‘Kantianism’ is concerned might in fact display some important differences in their reception of Kant's method. If one wants to provide an adequate representation of the diversity among the receptions of Kant's method, one needs to uncover these differences. Accordingly, it is important to single out those aspects of an appropriation of Kant's method that render the approach of a particular philosopher original in comparison with other figures with whom they are customarily associated for their ‘Kantianism’. Third, since the diversity among various interpretations raises the question of ‘who got Kant right’, one needs to ask the question concerning the relationship between a particular reading and Kant's own thought. One relevant issue here is whether the specificity of the views displayed by a particular philosopher are better explained by appealing to how they interpreted Kant's ideas, or to the direction in which they wanted to further develop Kant's views. There is also an additional task over and above the three just listed. It is a consequence of the fact that philosophers do not always unambiguously acknowledge Kant's influence, where this has sometimes led interpreters to overlook such influence. Therefore, fourth, one needs to highlight the Kantian origin of those views that, without being unambiguously labelled as Kantian by their proponents, nonetheless carry this legacy.

All the articles in this special issue pursue a combination of some or all of these tasks. In the volume, the articles are ordered chronologically according to the date of birth of the philosopher who plays the most relevant role in the reception taken into account. Here, however, I provide an overview of the contributions by organizing them according to the task that is more prominent in them. The articles that are mainly dedicated to the first task are those authored by Guido Kreis, Giuseppina D’Oro, and Karin de Boer and Stephen Howard. In ‘The Idea of Transcendental Analysis: Kant, Marburg Neo-Kantianism, and Strawson’, Kreis begins by clarifying what Hermann Cohen and other members of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism have called the method of ‘transcendental analysis’. According to Kreis, this method proceeds in three steps. First, transcendental analysis acknowledges the ‘factum of experience’. Second, it analyses this factum into the a priori conditions of experience and, third, it points out how the application of these basic norms constitutes the objectivity of experience. After having reconstructed transcendental analysis in this way, Kreis asks whether this method is, on the one hand, an adequate account of Kant's approach in the Critique of Pure Reason and, on the other, a consistent procedure in its own right. For one might object that Kant, in the Prolegomena, has described the method of the Critique as synthetic in opposition to the analytic method of the Prolegomena (4:274–5). Moreover, transcendental analysis might seem circular, since it both starts and ends with experience. As a response to the first objection, Kreis argues that Kant's claim in the Prolegomena that the Critique is synthetic is compatible with viewing the Critique as an exercise in transcendental analysis because what is meant by ‘synthetic method’ in that context does not involve the idea that the Critique cannot start by assuming the fact of experience. As a response to the second objection, Kreis claims that the method of transcendental analysis is circular only if one understands ‘analysis’ on the model of mathematical analysis, which, however, is a mistake, according to Kreis. Transcendental analysis is better represented as a case of ‘descriptive metaphysics’ similar to the one advocated by Peter Strawson in Individuals and The Bounds of Sense. In this way, Kreis draws a connection between neo-Kantianism and analytic philosophy which is not obvious.

A second contribution that is mainly dedicated to the first task, that is, comparing the views of those philosophers who present apparently opposed interpretations of Kant's method, is Giuseppina D’Oro's ‘Between Ontological Hubris and Epistemic Humility: Collingwood, Kant and the Role of Transcendental Arguments’. In her article, D’Oro first shows that R. G. Collingwood proposes a distinctive form of transcendental argument that can be read as having a Kantian background. Collingwood's transcendental arguments are designed to uncover the absolute ‘presuppositions’ that lie at the basis of the logic of question and answer of different sciences. Since these presuppositions can never be considered in the same way as particular propositions within the sciences of which they are presuppositions on pain of altering their nature as presuppositions, they cannot be treated as propositions that can be true or false. D’Oro argues that this feature of Collingwood's transcendental arguments differentiates his position from recent accounts of so-called ‘ambitious’ or ‘modest’ transcendental arguments. Customarily, the former are characterized as directed at ‘truth’, while the latter only aim to establish ‘belief’. This means that the former try to establish that a certain proposition doubted by a sceptic is true, while the latter only show that we cannot avoid believing the proposition in question. Collingwood's form of transcendental argument does not fit within any of these categories. It is not truth-directed because the presuppositions it uncovers are incapable of truth and falsity, but it is not belief-directed either, since it does not aim to establish that we can legitimately believe that these presuppositions obtain.

In their co-authored contribution, ‘A Ground Completely Overgrown: Heidegger, Kant, and the Problem of Metaphysics’, Karin de Boer and Stephen Howard place Heidegger's reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in its historical context. They show that Heidegger's own claim of radical originality for his study is misleading. On the one hand, Heidegger's position is indebted to metaphysical readings of the Critique like those of Max Wundt and Heinz Heimsoeth. On the other, even though Heidegger sharply criticizes Hermann Cohen's epistemological reading of the Critique, he uses the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that is central to Cohen's Kant's Theory of Experience, a methodological distinction which in turn is also used by Wundt. Finally, while de Boer and Howard's article reveals deeper continuities between readings of Kant that are normally viewed in opposition to one another, it also claims that the interpretation of the Critique based on the distinction between ground and grounded is inadequate to grasp Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic.

I pursue the second task, that is, revealing those aspects of an appropriation of Kant's method that render the approach of a particular philosopher original in comparison with other figures with whom they are customarily associated for their ‘Kantianism’, in my own article in the special issue, which is entitled ‘C. I. Lewis, Kant, and the Reflective Method of Philosophy’. The article starts from the consideration that while it is uncontroversial that C. I. Lewis’ approach to philosophy is Kantian in important respects, his ‘Kantianism’ is normally considered to simply reflect an approach to the a priori which was very common in the first half of the twentieth century, namely, the effort to make the a priori relative. I begin by showing that Lewis’ account of the pragmatic a priori has in fact many elements in common with Rudolf Carnap's account of linguistic frameworks in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, which I take to be representative of the attempt to relativize the a priori. I then show that Lewis’ Kantianism presents, nonetheless, important elements of originality. These can be detected if one focuses on his account of the reflective method of philosophy in Mind and the World Order. I read this method in light of Kant's account of transcendental reflection in the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. In metaphysics, philosophical reflection can correct errors of reasoning that occur when we are operating within a particular conceptual scheme and use the criteria of reality that are appropriate in another. Finally, I claim that this approach to metaphysics is interesting not only from an historical point of view, since it shows that Peter Strawson's famous distinction between a ‘descriptive’ and a ‘revisionary’ metaphysics does not constitute a dichotomy between incompatible approaches. In Lewis’ account, metaphysics incorporates both descriptive and revisionary characteristics.

The third task of this special issue, namely, addressing the relationship between a particular interpretation of Kant's philosophical method and Kant's own views, is central in the articles authored by Sebastian Gardner, James O'Shea and John Callanan. In his contribution, ‘Schelling's Substantive Reinterpretation of the Transcendental Turn: Beyond Method’, Gardner investigates to what extent Schelling's philosophical development between 1794 and 1804 can be read as still staying within a Kantian transcendental standpoint. Schelling's interest in Spinoza and his investigations into Naturphilosophie might lead one to think that the development of his thought in this timeframe is better described as a gradual abandonment of the Kantian background. Gardner claims that this approach would be wrong. In his account, Schelling's inquiry into Naturphilosophie should not be viewed as staying in opposition to the transcendental standpoint of, for example, Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. On the contrary, in Schelling's eyes, Naturphilosophie is complementary to the transcendental standpoint. According to Gardner, this becomes evident in Schelling's 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism. As a consequence of the complementarity between Naturphilosophie and the transcendental standpoint, Schelling's development should not be described as a gradual abandonment of transcendentalism. It is rather an attempt to give a more substantial grounding to the transcendental turn, which renders Schelling's transcendentalism original in comparison to Fichte's and Hegel's alternatives.

The article ‘On Sellars’ Exam Question Trilemma: Are Kant's Premises Analytic, or Synthetic A Priori, or A Posteriori?’, authored by James O'Shea, provides an account of the ‘analytic’ transcendental method that Wilfrid Sellars attributed to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In O'Shea's view, Sellars reads the Critique as unfolding analytic a priori conceptual truths. O'Shea considers both whether this reading of the Critique is plausible and whether it can survive a trilemma that Sellars himself presented to the students of his Kant class. The trilemma submits that the premises of the Critique of Pure Reason are either analytic (in which case its conclusions must also be analytic and so trivial), synthetic a priori (in which case he would assume what needs to be proven) or synthetic a posteriori (in which case its conclusions are at best empirical generalizations). In O'Shea's reconstruction, Sellars’ own response to the trilemma is that the premises of the Critique are analytic in that they provide an analysis of the concept of an object of possible experience, but Sellars denies that this means that its conclusions are trivial. O'Shea concludes his article by showing how important this Kantian methodological approach is for accounting for how Sellars defended his most original philosophical views.

In his article, ‘Methodological Conservativism in Kant and Strawson’, John Callanan claims that both Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason and Peter Strawson's descriptive metaphysics are exercises in what he calls ‘methodological conservativism’. Callanan characterizes these exercises as ‘philosophical strategies that have the aim of protecting certain first-order commitments against possible revision’. While both Kant and Strawson are methodological conservatives in this sense, their conservativisms are nonetheless very different. While for Kant it is some particular scientific claims that need to be protected, Strawson's project can be described as the attempt to secure our manifest image from revisions occurring in our scientific image. Both forms of conservativism have their upsides and downsides with respect to one another. Kant's project is certainly vulnerable to changes in our scientific image, but his attempt to keep together our scientific and manifest images avoids some problems that first arise within Strawson's approach.

The last task of this special issue, that is, highlighting the Kantian origin of the method of those philosophers that do not unambiguously acknowledge a Kantian legacy and are consequently not customarily interpreted as carrying this legacy, is central to the articles of Alfredo Ferrarin and Samantha Matherne. In ‘Method in Kant and Hegel’, Ferrarin draws attention to the many similarities between Kant's and Hegel's accounts of the method of philosophy, similarities that Hegel fails to acknowledge. Ferrarin shows that both Kant and Hegel present a very original account of method, according to which method is ‘the arrangement and structure that reason gives its contents and cognitions’. There are two important consequences of this approach. First, for both Kant and Hegel, method is not a procedure that can be considered separately from the objects on which it is applied. Rather, method, as the systematic order we give to cognitions, cannot be considered separately from these cognitions and their objects. Second, because the issue of method is essentially linked to reason's self-knowledge, the problem of method is first of all the problem of the method of philosophy, which means that the question of the methods of other disciplines is necessarily subordinated to the question of the method of philosophy. Even though Kant and Hegel agree on these fundamental points, Ferrarin does not avoid pointing out where their views diverge. In this respect, Ferrarin signals how Hegel's considerations on the method of mathematics and its significance for philosophy are superficial in comparison to Kant's. Finally, Ferrarin emphasizes the implications of Hegel's dialectical approach for the way in which he accounts for the method of philosophy.

Last but not least, Samantha Matherne uncovers some affinities between Kant's philosophical method and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach that might remain unnoticed given Merleau-Ponty's explicit criticism of Kant's line of argument in, for example, the Transcendental Deduction. Matherne starts from the present debate in Merleau-Ponty scholarship between those interpreters that ascribe a certain naturalism to him and those that read him as a transcendental philosopher and an heir of Kant and Husserl. Matherne brings new energy to this debate by focusing on Merleau-Ponty's reception of Kant's method. She shows that Merleau-Ponty is in fact really critical of Kant's approach to philosophy, an approach that Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘method of that-without-which’. Matherne characterizes this method as ‘a regressive method that starts with experience only in order to advance to the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience’. Notwithstanding these explicit criticisms, Matherne shows that there are elements of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach that bear important similarities to themes in Kant's aesthetic. For this reason, Matherne claims, Merleau-Ponty should not be read as abandoning Kant's transcendental standpoint, but as developing an original transcendental aesthetic with a Kantian background.

It is my hope that the papers in this special issue will contribute to showing the breath and richness of Kant's influence over questions regarding the method of philosophical inquiry. In this introduction, I have emphasized the diversity and variety in the ways Kant's philosophical method has been interpreted and transformed. Hopefully, the articles in this special issue show that giving this diversity and variety proper notice is not an obstacle to an adequate understanding of Kant, but is rather an important source of insights regarding both Kant's own method and the method of philosophy in its own right.

Acknowledgments

Some of the papers in the special issue were originally presented at a workshop on ‘Kant's Method in Philosophy and its Reception’ that took place at the University of Frankfurt in October 2015. Speakers at the event were: Stefano Bacin, Karin de Boer, John Callanan, Alfredo Ferrarin, Thomas Höwing, Guido Kreis, and myself. The special issue is part of a research project sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft on ‘Kant, Transcendental Strategies and Philosophical Antinomies’ that I run at the University of Frankfurt from October 2014 until May 2018.⁶ I would like to thank both the participants in the workshop and the contributors to this special issue for their involvement in the project. I would also like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financially supporting the whole project and both the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern of the University of Frankfurt for sponsoring the workshop in Frankfurt. Final thanks go to Michael Beaney and Alix Cohen for their useful guidance at every step from the planning to the realization of this special issue.

ORCID

Gabriele Gava http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9568-3662

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number 258671124].

Notes

6 Among other publications arising from the latter project see in particular: Gava, ‘Kant, Wolff, and the Method of Philosophy’; Gava, ‘Kant, the Third Antinomy and Transcendental Arguments’; Gava, The Current Relevance of Kant's Method in Philosophy; Gava, Kant's Method in the Critique of Pure Reason.

1 Evidence that Kant regularly gets ‘rediscovered’ in the history of philosophy are the studies that, at different points in time, connect Kant's philosophy to views that are ‘contemporary’ at that moment. For relatively recent studies of this kind see Parrini, Kant and Contemporary Epistemology; Bird and Friedman, ‘Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy’; Heidemann and Engelhard, Warum Kant heute?.

2 There are also studies with a regional focus, for example, on Kant's influence in France (Vallois, La Formation de l’influence kantienne en France; Azouvi and Bourel, De Königsberg à Paris), England (Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838), Scotland (Guyer, ‘The Scottish Reception of Kant’), or Italy (Zambelloni, Le origini del kantismo in Italia; La tradizione kantiana in Italia).

3 A few recent companions to Kant such as those edited by Bird, A Companion to Kant; Guyer, The Cambridge Companion to Kant's or Besoli, La Rocca and Martinelli, L’universo kantiano are an exception. They all contain chapters dedicated to the reception of Kant in different traditions. However, because they do not focus on a particular aspect of Kant's thought and dedicate only a limited part of the volumes to these receptions, they only provide an initial introduction to the problems related to Kant's influence. Another exception is the collection edited by Gardner and Grist, The Transcendental Turn. The latter focuses on the effects of Kant's ‘transcendental turn’ on the subsequent history of philosophy and takes into consideration philosophers belonging to different traditions. Because it considers these different receptions from the point of view of a particular issue, this collection, in comparison to the companions just mentioned, allows one to better compare the views of the different philosophers it analyses. Let me note that Gardner and Grist's collection is complementary to this special issue for two reasons. First, it also tries to make sense of the diversity of Kant's receptions in different traditions. Second, its focus on the transcendental turn surely touches on methodological aspects of Kant's thought. However, there are also important differences between the two volumes. To begin with, this special issue also considers traditions that are not represented in Gardner and Grist's collection, like British idealism and neo-Kantianism. More importantly, the problem of Kant's methodology and the problem of Kant's transcendental turn do not perfectly overlap. On the one hand, there are issues related to Kant's methodology that are independent of the transcendental perspective he inaugurated, as for example his reflexions concerning the role of systematicity in the sciences. On the other, a focus on Kant's transcendental turn involves taking into account some of his substantive philosophical views in a way that a focus on his methodology does not.

4 Even though the topic of Kant's philosophical method is relevant for any substantial claim he makes and is therefore potentially related to the reception of every such claim, for space reasons and for providing a unitary structure to the special issue, the question of the reception of Kant's philosophical method is here considered in relation to the application of this method in the theoretical part of his philosophy.

5 But see Guido Kreis’ article in this special issue.