A History of Philosophy in EpitomeSchwegler, Albert
Philosophy
A History of Philosophy in Epitome
Schwegler, Albert
Philosophy -- History
things in themselves (_noumena_), since our intuition gives us only
phenomena for the content of our conceptions, and the thing in itself
can never be given in a possible experience; our knowledge remains
limited to the phenomena. The source of all the confusions and errors
and strife in previous metaphysics, was in confounding the phenomenal
with the noumenal world.
Besides the categories or conceptions of the understanding, which have
been considered, and which are especially important for experience,
though often applied erroneously beyond the province of experience,
there are other conceptions whose peculiar province is only to deceive;
conceptions whose express determination is to pass beyond the province
of experience, and which may consequently be called transcendent. These
are the fundamental conceptions and principles of the previous
metaphysics. To examine these conceptions, and destroy the appearance of
objective science and knowledge, which they falsely exhibit, is the
problem of the _Transcendental Dialectics_ (the second part of the
transcendental logic).
3. THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTICS.—In a strict sense, the reason is
distinguished from the understanding. As the understanding has its
categories, the reason has its ideas; as the understanding forms
fundamental maxims from conceptions, the reason forms principles from
ideas, in which the maxims of the understanding have their highest
confirmation. The peculiar work of the reason is, in general, to find
the unconditioned for the conditioned knowledge of the understanding,
and to unify it. Hence the reason is the faculty of the unconditioned,
or of principles; but since it has no immediate reference to objects,
but only to the understanding and its judgments, its activity must
remain an immanent one. If it would take the highest unity of the reason
not simply in a transcendental sense, but exalt it to an actual object
of knowledge, then it would become transcendent in that it applied the
conceptions of the understanding to the knowledge of the unconditioned.
From this transcending and false use of the categories, arises the
transcendental appearance which decoys us beyond experience, by the
delusive pretext of widening the domain of the pure understanding. It is
the problem of the transcendental logic to discover this transcendental
appearance.
The speculative ideas of the reason, derived from the three kinds of
logical conclusion, the categorical, the hypothetical, and the
disjunctive, are threefold.
(1.) The psychological idea, the idea of the soul, as a thinking
substance (the object hitherto of rational psychology).
(2.) The cosmological idea, the idea of the world as including all
phenomena (the object hitherto of cosmology).
(3.) The theological idea, the idea of God as the highest condition of
the possibility of all things (the object hitherto of rational
theology).
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