Publications

Authors:

Pozzo, Riccardo

Title:

Review of Maurizio Ferraris, Goodbye, Kant!

Year:

2014

Type of item:

Recensione in Rivista

Tipologia ANVUR:

Recensione in rivista

Language:

Inglese

Format:

Elettronico

Name of journal:

NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS

ISSN of journal:

1538-1617

Number or Folder:

July 20, 2014

:

Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Frommann-Holzboog, 2007

Publisher:

SUNY Press

ISBN:

9781438448084

Page numbers:

1-4

Keyword:

Kant; realism

Short description of contents:

This short book provides an accessible account of a very difficult one, the Critique of Pure Reason, by far the most influential of Kant's works, for it was the first of the three Critiques and made most fully explicit the Copernican revolution, which is the main subject of Ferraris's book. After a first chapter on Kant's revolution of eighteenth-century metaphysics, Ferraris isolates Kant's most fundamental claims in chapter two, and then, in chapter three, he shows what Kant inherits from tradition, in chapter four, what he invents, and in chapter five what goes wrong. Chapters six to eight set out the fundamental claims in detail, without comparing them with alternative theories, but taking literally Kant's idea that there are principles which hold good not just for science, but also for experience. Chapter nine seeks to dismantle the sophisticated mechanism that stands behind the doctrines, and chapter ten presents Kant's evolution after the first Critique. Finally, chapter eleven aims at a reckoning with the revolution, its immediate effects and its legacy, its merits, and its martyrs. In some of the chapters, Ferraris limits himself to pursuing Kant's line of thought; in others he includes systematic reflections and historical observations. To alert the reader, the titles of these chapters describe each as an "Examinations." For Ferraris, given that "ontology includes everything that is in heaven and earth, the realm of objects that are available to experience," which makes up the first main topic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and given that "metaphysics deals with what goes beyond or transcends [experience]," which makes up the second main topic of the book, it does indeed make sense to speak of Kant's metaphysics and ontology (p. 20). In fact, "the reader of the Analytic has before him Kant's ontology, a work of construction and not of destruction" (p. 21). Ferraris follows suit with the two otherwise opposed readings of Kant by Strawson and Heidegger, with Strawson calling for a metaphysics of experience and Heidegger for an analysis of finite human being, "which amounts" -- Ferraris succinctly notes -- "to the same thing, said with more passion" (p. 21). Ferraris sees in Kant's first Critique -- a work of both ontology and metaphysics -- the naturalization of physics at its outset. In virtue of the Copernican revolution, Kant is describing both the human mind and the necessary pure structures of humans and perhaps other beings suitably similar to them: "mind and world are two sides of the same coin" (p. 27). Today, the naturalization of physics implies a basic level of ontology and a higher level of epistemology. From this standpoint, it is easy to make out Kant's confusion between the two levels, which provides amusing arguments in chapters 6 to 8, in which Ferraris takes on Kant's proposals regarding conceptual schemes, phenomena, space, time, the "I," substance, and cause, with a view to seeing whether they really suffice to explain our experience (p. 47). The answer is no.. We may wish Kant "Good-bye," suggests Ferraris -- and come back to where it all came from, namely from realism, from Aristotle, let me add. Ferraris proposes that we might eventually want to ask why Kant had to appeal to physics to set in motion the "clumsy mechanism" of the deduction. The answer again is "because physics presented the only response then available to the skeptical consequence of empiricism. If he had had, for instance, Darwinian theory at his disposal, then it would have been enough to say that we are as we are because we evolved in world that is as it is" (p. 91). Although a response like this might seem Panglossian in implicitly supposing that our world is the best of all possible, "there would have been no need for a transcendental deduction," for "some reference to motor skills and bodily schemes would have done the trick" (p. 91), which would have called back into play realism in place of transcendentalism. As regard

Web page:

http://www.ndpr.nd.edu

Product ID:

82380

Handle IRIS:

11562/761161

Deposited On:

July 18, 2014

Last Modified:

November 15, 2022

Bibliographic citation:

Pozzo, Riccardo, Review A Review of Maurizio Ferraris, Goodbye, Kant!, «NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS» , n. July 20, 2014 , 2014 , pp. 1-4

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