Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: Kant’s Own Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason
The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) is a preface, or introduction, to the main themes of Kant’s great work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). It deals with the foundations of scientific explanation, in physics and mathematics, and of philosophical claims: a treatise setting out the basic foundations of philosophy.
Author: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Title: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science (1783)
Format: English paperback (Oxford Philosophical Texts), 264 pages, with two early reviews of the Critique
Scope: Kant’s own summary of the Critique of Pure Reason
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0198751516 (ASIN 0198751516)
What Is Metaphysics?
Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that seeks a logical and theoretical grounding for origins and causes beyond the physical. Kant asks whether it can ever be a science in the way mathematics and physics are.
Kant’s Answer
Kant concludes that metaphysics is impossible as a science: for there to be knowledge, a concept must be backed by empirical content, but we have no empirical content for the objects of metaphysics, God, the world as a whole and the soul. They are pure concepts of reason, transcendental ideas.
Why Kant Wrote It
The Critique of Pure Reason was received with incomprehension. Readers found it obscure, and an anonymous review in a Göttingen journal in 1782, largely written by the philosopher Christian Garve and edited by J.G.H. Feder, presented Kant’s theory as a version of Berkeley’s idealism. Kant was irritated, and he wrote the Prolegomena partly to correct such misreadings and partly to offer a shorter, clearer route into his ideas. The Oxford edition includes the reviews that provoked him, which helps readers see what he was answering.
Hume and the Dogmatic Slumber
The preface contains one of the most famous confessions in philosophy: Kant writes that it was David Hume who first interrupted his "dogmatic slumber". Hume had argued that our idea of cause and effect cannot be justified by reason or experience, only by habit. Kant took the challenge seriously and asked how we can know anything necessary and universal about the world at all, a question that led him to the whole critical philosophy.
Synthetic Judgements A Priori
The central question of the book is how "synthetic a priori" judgements are possible: statements that add to our knowledge, unlike mere definitions, yet are known independently of experience. Kant’s example is arithmetic: 7 + 5 = 12. He organises the Prolegomena around four questions: how is pure mathematics possible, how is pure natural science possible, how is metaphysics in general possible, and how is metaphysics possible as a science? His answer is that space, time and the basic concepts of the understanding are forms that the mind brings to experience, so we can know a priori the structure of the world as it appears to us, but not things as they are in themselves.
The Philosopher of Königsberg
Kant (1724–1804) spent his entire life in and around Königsberg, in East Prussia, where he taught at the university. He published the Critique at the age of fifty-seven, and the decade that followed, including the Prolegomena and his works on ethics and aesthetics, transformed Western philosophy.
Tip
Read the preface and the section on Hume first; they explain the whole project.
Note
Keep a glossary of Kant’s terms nearby.
Why Read It
In this book Kant answers the transcendental questions briefly and simply, without ambiguity, or at least far more briefly and simply than in the Critique. It is the best way into Kant’s thought for anyone who finds the Critique too daunting, and the Oxford edition adds useful notes and two early reviews.
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