The History of Pure Reason

Abstract

It is certainly obvious that change will play a certain role in Kant’s thinking, particularly in his political writings; after all, Kant himself witnessed important political and more generally social changes during his lifetime. What critics usually point to is not the lack of an account of change in Kant’s thought, but the significance or rather lack of significance this seems to be given from the perspective of Kant’s account of the a priori structures through which he thinks we are in interaction with the world. Given the epistemic significance of these structures, as having an absolute validity from the perspective of our limited capacities, they appear to us as unchanging and not to be changed. From this limited perspective, change would seem a contingent inconvenience, rather than a necessary, meaningful and important aspect of our lives. As a result, difficulties seem to surface at various junctures in Kant’s thinking. For instance, and this is the focus of the papers in this panel, Kant’s account of the a priori structures of interaction with the world or, in short, his account of pure reason (whether theoretical or practical, moral-political) seems in contradiction with his attempt to discuss the “The History of Pure Reason”; if pure reason consists of a priori structures which make possible our cognition of the world and of its natural and moral laws, then there can be no history of pure reason. And, yet, Kant has a chapter in his section on methodology in the Critique of Pure Reason precisely on this topic.