Defining the limits of a historical period always entails an element of arbitrariness. There are good reasons, however, for setting the conclusion of the first cycle in the reception of Kant's critical program at August 7, 1799, just under twenty years after the first appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason. The date marks the publication of Kant's open letter in which he repudiated Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and other attempts at bringing his transcendental philosophy to completion. His own critical work, which in the Critique he had claimed to be only of an introductory nature (A 11 / B 25), he now declared to constitute the system of pure reason itself. From that date onward the very reception of Kant became a problem, itself the subject of interpretation and reception. Moreover, at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had predicted that, following the path laid out by his program, one could “secure for human reason complete satisfaction” in regard to all its metaphysical preoccupations, and that this goal could be achieved “before the end of the present century” (A 856 / B 884).

Kant's philosophy is often characterized as an attempt to provide the metaphysical foundation for Newtonian science. In such a characterization, the revolutionary metaphysical stance that Kant develops in the Critique of Pure Reason, based on a distinction between appearances and things in themselves, is seen as the result of his commitment to show the legitimacy of Newtonian science in a manner that still leaves space for morality and religious belief. His well-known dictum that he had “found it necessary to deny knowledge [of reality in itself], in order to make room for faith” (B xxx) bears witness to the legitimacy of this characterization of the Kantian project.

Such a description of the Critique leaves open, however, the question of Kant's more general beliefs about the philosophy of science. In this chapter, I shall show that Kant advocates a more empirically minded philosophy of science than could be anticipated from his views on Newtonian physics. In particular, I will show that Kant presents an account of the use of theoretical concepts in the development of scientific theories under the rubric of the “regulative use of reason” The understanding of science that Kant presents under this title has a great deal in common with the pragmatic understanding of scientific practice, in which the fallibility of particular scientific theories is stressed. Once the regulative use of reason is taken into account, it becomes clear that Kant views the scientific enterprise in a more empirical and less aprioristic manner than has been commonly thought.

Kant invented a new way of understanding morality and ourselves as moral agents. The originality and profundity of his moral philosophy have long been recognized. It was widely discussed during his own lifetime, and there has been an almost continuous stream of explanation and criticism of it ever since. Its importance has not diminished with time. The quality and variety of current defenses and developments of his basic outlook and the sophistication and range of criticism of it give it a central place in contemporary ethics. In the present essay I offer a general survey of the main features of Kant's moral philosophy. Many different interpretations of it have been given, and his published works show that his views changed in important ways. Nonetheless there is a distinctive Kantian position about morality, and most commentators are agreed on its main outlines.

THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS IN EIGHTEENTHCENTURY Germany

Kant's early philosophical career before the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in May 1781 was dominated by an unhappy love affair. “I have had the fate to be in love with metaphysics,” Kant wrote ruefully in 1766, “although I can hardly flatter myself to have received favors from her.” This preoccupation with metaphysics provided the leitmotif, and indeed the underlying drama, behind Kant's early intellectual development. We can divide his career into four phases according to whether he accepted or rejected the blandishments of his mistress. The first phase, from 1746 to 1759, is the period of infatuation. During these years Kant's chief aim was to provide a foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, he developed a rationalist epistemology that could justify the possibility of knowledge of God, providence, immortality, and the first causes of nature. The second phase, from 1760 to 1766, is the period of disillusionment. Kant broke with his earlier rationalist epistemology and inclined toward skepticism, utterly rejecting the possibility of a metaphysics that transcends the limits of experience.

Kant's practical philosophy in its entirety comprises ethics and philosophy of right, moral theology, moral anthropology, and the philosophy of history, and combines them into one impressive theoretical structure. The theory of the self-legislation of pure practical reason developed in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788) stands at the center of this system. Through this theory Kant provides an entirely new theoretical foundation for justification in practical philosophy. In the previous history of practical philosophy foundations and first principles were sought in objective ideas, in a normative constitution of the cosmos, in the will of God, in the nature of man, or in prudence in the service of self-interest; but Kant was convinced that these starting-points were without exception inadequate for the foundation of unconditional practical laws, and that human reason could only concede absolute practical necessity and obligatoriness to norms that arose from its own legislation.

Among the pillars of Kant's philosophy, and of his transcendental idealism in particular, is the view of space and time as a priori intuitions and as forms of outer and inner intuition respectively. The first part of the systematic exposition of the Critique of Pure Reason is the Transcendental Aesthetic, whose task is to set forth this conception. It is then presupposed in the rest of the systematic work of the Critique in the Transcendental Logic.

The claim of the Aesthetic is that space and time are a priori intuitions. Knowledge is called a priori if it is “independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses” (B 2). Kant is not very precise about what this “independence” consists in. In the case of a priori judgments, it seems clear that being a priori implies that no particular facts verified by experience and observation are to be appealed to in their justification. Kant holds that necessity and universality are criteria of apriority in a judgment, and clearly this depends on the claim that appeal to facts of experience could not justify a judgment made as necessary and universal. Because Kant is quite consistent about what propositions he regards as a priori and about how he characterizes the notion, the absence of a more precise explanation has not led to its being regarded in commentary on Kant as one of his more problematic notions, even though a reader of today would be prepared at least to entertain the idea that the notion of a priori knowledge is either hopelessly unclear or vacuous.

THE CRITIQUE OF REASON

Whatever else a critique of reason attempts, it must surely criticize reason. Further, if it is not to point toward nihilism, a critique of reason cannot have only a negative or destructive outcome, but must vindicate at least some standards or principles as authorities on which thinking and doing may rely, and by which they may (in part) be judged. Critics of “the Enlightenment project” from Pascal to Horkheimer to contemporary communitarians and postmodernists, detect its Achilles' heel in arrant failure to vindicate the supposed standards of reason that are so confidently used to criticize, attack, and destroy other authorities, including church, state, and tradition. If the authority of reason is bogus, why should such reasoned criticism have any weight?

Suspicions about reason can be put innumerable ways. However, one battery of criticisms is particularly threatening, because it targets the very possibility of devising anything that could count as a vindication of reason. This line of attack is sometimes formulated as a trilemma. Any supposed vindication of the principles of reason would have to establish the authority of certain fundamental constraints on thinking or acting. However, this could only be done in one of three ways. A supposed vindication could appeal to the presumed principles of reason that it aims to vindicate - but would then be circular, so fail as vindication. Alternatively, it might be based on other starting points - but then the supposed principles of reason would lack reasoned vindication, so could not themselves bequeath unblemished pedigrees.

In the Transcendental Analytic Kant develops a characteristically striking - and at the same time characteristically elusive - conception of the causal relation. Thus, for example, in a preliminary section (13) to the transcendental deduction Kant introduces the problem by remarking that, with respect to the concept of cause, “it is a priori not clear why appearances should contain something of this kind” (A 90 / B 122); for, as far as sensibility is concerned, “everything could be situated in such disorder that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing offered itself that suggested a rule of synthesis - and thus would correspond to the concept of cause and effect - so that this concept would therefore be entirely empty, null, and without meaning” (A 90 / B 123). A memorable paragraph then follows:

Adolf Griinbaum's provocative book, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, was quickly accorded an impressive reception. His earlier critical pieces on the subject caused a stir among their audiences, audiences that included philosophers, psychoanalysts, and other interested persons. As was expected, some of the pieces were incorporated in the book; indeed, because of them, its appearance had been anticipated with feelings that ranged from glee to dismay. Neither of those extreme feelings, however, has obtruded on the respectful tone of most of the book's wide notice. There are several reasons for that tone. Among them is Griinbaum's familiarity with important phases of Freud's work, especially those leading up to the public inception of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the century. Griinbaum's book also displays an acquaintance with a variety of Freud's later writings and with post-Freudian psychoanalytic developments. In addition it furnishes a compendium of the criticisms Freud's thought has evoked. Also, for interesting but disproportionate measure, a third of the book indicts hermeneutic construals of Freud, notably those of Habermas and Ricoeur. Finally, but surely not least, Griinbaum brings to those topics and related ones a rare discursive and polemical tirelessness.

How can the insights into individual psychology gained through the techniques of psychoanalysis illuminate the cultural, collective life of people in society? Freud returned to this question throughout his career in a series of works sometimes referred to as the “cultural books” ; these include Totem and Taboo (1912-13); Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c); Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a); and Moses and Monotheism (1939a). In this essay, I give an exposition of these works in which I stress their unity, their evolution as psychoanalytic theory itself developed, and what I take to be their central argument. I also intend to show how vital aspects to this central argument may, despite the many difficulties these books present to the contemporary student of society and culture, contribute in powerful ways to our understanding of human social existence.

Before turning to the cultural books themselves, however, I want to begin by drawing attention to the fact that Freud was, from the first, concerned with ordinary cultural life. Of the book-length projects to which he applied himself as soon as he had completed the self-analysis which played so crucial a role in his intellectual development, three were nonclinical accounts of normal phenomena in which are visible the workings of unconscious thought processes, namely, dreams (1900a), slips of the tongue (1901b), and jokes (1905c). The effect of these works is to undermine the very distinction between normal and neurotic and to show that something other than rational, secondary process thought is a normal and essential aspect of all human life.

The Oedipus complex lies at the heart of Freud's dynamic developmental theory. In the evolvement of psychoanalytic theory, this complex is associated with the entire range of feelings the child may experience in relation to his parents and interactions he or she may have with them. The love and hate of the Oedipus complex, the conflict, and the way in which the complex is resolved become at certain points the basis for the understanding not only of child development, personality trends, and psychopathology, but also of broader phenomena, such as the development of social institutions, religion, and morality.

Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex emerge gradually; they change, the terminology is changed, the scope of what is to be considered oedipal is constricted and expanded. These developments and vicissitudes were influenced by a variety of factors. Freud's attempts to conceptualize intrapsychic material emerging from analyses of some of his patients, as well as from his self-analysis, his attempt to deal with opposing theories and their proponents, and the interaction of the oedipal complex with other focal theoretical issues, are among the major influential factors.

In the first section an outline of the basic stages in the evolution of Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex is presented. In the second section we present some conjectures about events in Freud's personal and professional life that influenced the course of development of his ideas on the Oedipus complex.

Freud in the last phase of his work gave increasing attention to questions about civilization, about its roots in and effects on human psychology. He was particularly interested in whether civilization on the whole helped or hindered human beings in their search for happiness, and he dealt with this question in two well-known books, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, the first of which he wrote in 1927 and the second in 1930. This essay is a study of differences between the views that he expressed in these two books. The differences indicate a shift in his outlook, and the essay represents an attempt to understand the reasons behind this shift.

The Future of an Illusion ends in optimism. Briefly, Freud's hopeful conclusion was this: Just as healthy individuals overcome their childish ways as they mature, as reason comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives, so too healthy societies should overcome their primitive practices as they mature, as science comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives. Three years later, when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud's optimism had dimmed. He ended the work on a somber note. No one, Freud observed, in this age of great technological advances can be confident that the struggle between life-giving and life-destroying forces that shapes civilization will not have a ruinous outcome. No doubt the rise of the Nazis and the Fascists during the intervening years partly explains this shift in his outlook. But his further reflections on the nature of civilization help to explain it as well.

Freud opens his ingenious and revealing essay on the Moses of Michelangelo with a disclaimer. He had, he said, no more than a layman's or amateur's knowledge of art: neither in his attitude to art nor in the way in which he experienced its attractions was he a connoisseur. He goes on:

And then, as if for a moment conscious that he might appear to be imposing his own personal peculiarities, a quirk of his own temperament, upon a subject with its own code, with its own imperatives, he hastens to concede what he calls "the apparently paradoxical fact" that "precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding." Before these works we feel admiration, awe-and bewilderment. "Possibly," Freud goes on with that irony which he permitted himself in talking of established ways of thinking

A recent essay in Science compares Freud's work with contemporary “cognitive science.” The comparison is rather to Freud's disadvantage, and to the disadvantage of Freud's contemporaries: Our contemporaries have a conception of the mind as a computational system. Some of their theories posit a quantity, “activation,” that is responsible for aspects of mental functioning. Some of their theories postulate “parallel processing” through a network that is analogous to the connected system of nerve cells in the human nervous system. Unlike Freud, the story goes, our contemporaries have an experimental tradition that supports their theories. The result is that we now have a powerful and distinctive science of both the unconscious and the conscious, a science whose theories have led to new experiments “that tentatively reveal a tripartite classification of nonconscious mental life that is quite different from the seething unconscious of Freud.”

In a general way, these perceptions are widely shared, not only among academic psychologists, but among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, research administrators, and increasingly, the educated public. They have the impression that contemporary cognitive psychology with its computer simulations of mind is onto something new and scientific that was at best only dimly foreshadowed in earlier psychologies. My purpose is to argue the contrary. A big part of contemporary cognitive science is pretty much what you would expect to get if Sigmund Freud had had a computer.