Abstract:
The thesis wants to argue in favour of a continuist relation between the precritical and critical period of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. A detailed analysis of the
most relevant pre-critical efforts will show that the critical project of a propaedeutic
science, one that could ground metaphysics as a science, was not the product of new
research carried out between 1770 and 1781; rather, it came from the gradual and
coherent development that started with his early philosophy. By showing which precritical works anticipated the Critique, the thesis will criticise discontinuous
interpretations of Kant’s thought and, simultaneously, propose a new understanding of
“Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” and the “Inaugural Dissertation” as anticipations of the
transcendental dialectic.
