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Proops’s ‘Nugget of Gold’ in Kant’s Dialectic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2024

Desmond P. Hogan
Desmond P. Hogan*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
*
Email: deshogan@princeton.edu
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Abstract

The Fiery Test of Critique describes Kant’s indirect proof of idealism from the Antinomy of Pure Reason as the ‘nugget of gold’ in the Critique of Pure Reason’s Transcendental Dialectic. Here, I offer critical reflections on Proops’s reading of Kant’s indirect proof.

Keywords

Kantidealist argumentstranscendental idealismantinomy of pure reasonfreedom
Type
Author Meets Critic
Information
Kantian Review , First View , pp. 1 - 9
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

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References

Notes

1 Ian Proops, The Fiery Test of Critique. A Reading of Kant’s Dialectic (Oxford University Press 2021); citations throughout simply by page number. Citations from Kant’s works, apart from the Critique of Pure Reason, cite the volume and page number of the Academy edition. Quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are cited according to the standard A and B pagination for the first and second editions, respectively. Translations are my own.

2 Cf. 23: 41 (from marginalia to the A edition). When Kant says that the thesis and antithesis of the third and fourth antinomies ‘may both be true’, as Proops notes (p. 281) he is not claiming to have justified on theoretical grounds the logical or the real possibility of transcendental freedom (3rd antinomy) or God’s existence (4th). He is rather simply arguing that spatiotemporal order, on his idealist proposal, does not exclude such realities.

3 This point has also been spotted recently by Alexander Buchinski.

4 ‘Taken in the unlimited universality in which it there stands, [the PSR] is obviously false if applied to entities; for it says there could be absolutely nothing unconditioned. To seek to avoid this embarrassing consequence by saying of a supreme being that he does have a reason for his existence, but it lies within himself, leads to a contradiction’ (‘On a Discovery’, 8: 198).

5 See also Kant’s reference to the ‘wholly natural illusion of common reason’ arising from the mere ‘logical demand … to assume complete premises for a given conclusion’ (A500/B528; cf. A416–7/B444).

6 ‘Thesis: There exists in the world [sic] causes [sic] through freedom. Antithesis: There is no freedom but everything is nature’ (Prolegomena, 4: 339). ‘[I]nvestigation of the existence of God, of immortality, etc, wasn’t the point from which I set out, but rather the antinomy of pure reason: “The world has a beginning; It has no beginning etc. up the fourth [sic]: ‘there is freedom in the human [sic], vs there is no freedom but everything in him is natural necessity”’ (Correspondence, 12: 257).

7 See example on p. 303 (cf. p. 457): ‘Kant treats the thesis position of the third antinomy as asserting specifically that ‘the human will is free’ (A475/B503). But again, the printed third antinomy thesis asserts no such thing, and it would be a remarkable error on Kant’s part to claim it does.