Towards a New Understanding of Pre-Critical Philosophy: A Continuist Approach to Kant's Philosophical Development from 1755 to 1781.

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.