1. INTRODUCTION

With most present-day readers of the Critique of Pure Reason, interest flags as they pass the middle of the book. They see the action as pretty well concluded by the end of the Dialectic, when the limits of experiential knowledge have been established. All of those ensuing lucubrations about ideas, ideals, regulative precepts, methodology, teleology, and practical principles they regard as mere foreshadowings of the later Critiques that are best put aside in the interest of getting on to those books themselves. Despite Kant's own explicit insistence in the preface to the second edition, they have little use for the idea that this foray beyond the realm of sense experience actually represents the crux of the first Critique, and that the main thesis of the book is that the limits of objectoriented knowledge simply are not the limits of valid comprehension, so that rational belief can legitimately and effectively operate in regions where actual (sense-based) knowledge is unachievable. The thought that if this were not so, then those very deliberations of the critical philosophy itself would become unraveled is something that does not occur - let alone appeal - to them. It is this thought, however, that provides the guideline of the present discussion, from whose point of view the deliberations that begin with “The Ideal of Pure Reason” are not only the concluding part of the first Critique, but its doctrinal culmination as well.

The ultimate goal of this chapter is set by the rarely asked question of just what is to be said on Kantian epistemic principles regarding the theses of Kant's own deliberations in the Critique of Pure Reason. The question is that of how Kant's philosophical practice can be made to square with its own principles - how the epistemic status of Kant's contentions is to be accounted for in their own terms.

In briefest outline, the position of the present deliberations is as follows: