Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Background to the Critique
- Part II The Arguments of the Critique
- 3 The Introduction to the Critique: Framing the Question
- 4 The Transcendental Aesthetic
- 5 The Deduction of the Categories: The Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions
- 6 The System of Principles
- 7 The Refutation of Idealism and the Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena
- 8 The Ideas of Pure Reason
- 9 The Paralogisms of Pure Reason
- 10 The Antinomies of Pure Reason
- 11 The Ideal of Pure Reason
- 12 The Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason: The Positive Role of Reason
- 13 The Transcendental Doctrine of Method
- Part III The Impact of the Critique
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - The Transcendental Doctrine of Method
from Part II - The Arguments of the Critique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Background to the Critique
- Part II The Arguments of the Critique
- 3 The Introduction to the Critique: Framing the Question
- 4 The Transcendental Aesthetic
- 5 The Deduction of the Categories: The Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions
- 6 The System of Principles
- 7 The Refutation of Idealism and the Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena
- 8 The Ideas of Pure Reason
- 9 The Paralogisms of Pure Reason
- 10 The Antinomies of Pure Reason
- 11 The Ideal of Pure Reason
- 12 The Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason: The Positive Role of Reason
- 13 The Transcendental Doctrine of Method
- Part III The Impact of the Critique
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The “Transcendental Doctrine of Method” is the second of the two main parts into which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason divides after its introduction. This means that, prima facie, I have an unfair assignment! For my brief is to cover all but one of its four chapters in this chapter, while coverage of the rest of the Critique is accorded ten chapters altogether. In fact, however, this is a misleading way to put it, as anyone remotely familiar with the Critique will know. There is a reason of pure size as to why it is misleading: the second part of the Critique is only one sixth of the length of the whole. But even in a metaphorical sense of magnitude, the second part brooks no real comparison with all that has gone before. It is very common for commentators on the Critique not to pay it any attention at all. Even Norman Kemp Smith, whose 650-page commentary comes as close as any to being a section-by-section companion to the Critique, relegates discussion of this part to a twenty-page appendix and remarks: “[Its] entire teaching . . . has already been more or less exhaustively expounded in the earlier divisions of the Critique.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , pp. 310 - 326Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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