Reasonable Ideas: Metaphysics und Meta-Metaphysics in Kant‘s Transcendental Dialec-tic

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tobias Rosefeldt
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547556746

The "Transcendental Dialectic" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has long been discussed primarily in terms of the criticism of metaphysics it contains. Following more recent developments in Kant scholarship, this project aims to draw a more differentiated picture of Kant's attitude towards metaphysics, in order to do justice to the fact that Kant sees its objects and principles as founded in the structure of human reason itself and considers certain forms of an affirmative attitude towards it to be permissible and even indispensable. The project will focus on Kant's meta-metaphysical question of how our representational, epistemic, and doxastic relation to the objects of pure reason is possible. For example, it will reconstruct how Kant derives the content of the transcendental ideas of soul, world, and God as concepts of the unconditioned from the structure of theoretical reason and its need for metaphysical explanation. And it will be investigated whether Kant's subtle differentiation between various epistemic and doxastic attitudes allows for a not purely negative attitude towards the objects of these ideas, without thereby violating the limits of knowledge drawn by Kant himself. The results of these considerations will also be explained paradigmatically, concentrating in particular on Kant's discussion of metaphysical aspects of mereology and on the principle of thoroughgoing determination in the chapter on the "Ideal". The aim of the project is to gain an exegetically adequate understanding of Kant's critique and reinterpretation of the claims of traditional metaphysics, and thereby also to reveal the potential of Kant's theory for various debates in contemporary metaphysics and meta-metaphysics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Andrew Chignell, Ph.D.; Professor Nicholas Stang; Professor Eric Watkins, Ph.D.